Monday, January 28, 2008

The Brown Daily heralDMonday, Januar y 28, 2008Volume CXLIII, No. 4 Since 1866, Daily Since 1891

www.browndailyherald.com 195 Angell Street, Providence, Rhode Island News tips: [email protected]

CAMPUS NEWS OPINIONSARTS & CULTURE

RAdICAL PRAyERLiz Lerman encourages creative collaboration between individuals

5 11MOvINg TO ThE hILLEric Rodriguez ’08 recruits transfer applicants from community colleges

AgENTS Of ChANgEMax Chaiken ’09 says students are apathetic and uninvolved

3TOMORROW’S WEAThERTuesday will be as cloudy as the chances of you getting better financial aid

cloudy 42 / 37

Corporation will discussfinancial aid next monthBy JOANNA WOhLMUThSenior Staff Writer

Announcements of drastic financial aid policy changes from colleges across the nation are starting to appear a dime a dozen. Now, pro-spective Brunonians are wondering how — or if — the University will respond.

“This is the most volatile I have ever seen this (college admissions) environment,” said Dean of Admis-sion James Miller ’73.

Following Harvard’s recent an-nouncement that it will ease the financial burden on students from middle-income families, at least 15 schools that compete for students with Brown have announced similar changes, Miller said. These include Princeton, Yale, Duke, Northwest-ern and Stanford universities, the University of Pennsylvania, as well as Dartmouth, Amherst, Bowdoin, Davidson, Swarthmore and Wil-liams colleges.

This issue “cannot be one that can marinate for several years,” Miller said. “It is a high priority for us.”

The Corporation will meet at the end of February to set a budget for the 2008-09 academic year and will discuss changes to financial aid pol-icy, said Provost David Kertzer ‘69 P’95 P’98. Kertzer said that many other institutions have chosen to announce financial aid changes at this time of year because they, too, are having budgetary meetings.

“Brown needs to decide what is the right thing to do,” Kertzer said. “There is some pressure to go with the stampede, which would not be wise.”

Recently top universities have felt political pressure to spend more in order to cut the cost of educa-

tion because of the rapid growth of endowments, Kertzer said. Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, has pres-sured wealthy schools to use more of their endowment returns to make education more affordable.

Some experts have voiced con-cern that the pressure to increase financial aid spending to compete with other universities may put a strain on schools that cannot boast endowments as large as Harvard, which has about $34 billion, ac-cording to the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Brown’s endowment is large compared to other institutions of a similar size — currently $2.8 billion, or 26th in the country, as of June 30, 2007, according to the Chronicle. But Kertzer said a bal-ance must be achieved when allo-cating funding. “Dollars spent on financial aid (don’t) grow on trees,” Kertzer said. “It has to come from

Weak dollar curbs wild nights in Paris and abroadBy ChAz KELShSenior Staff Writer

The weak dollar didn’t just hurt the wallet of Casey Collins ’09, who is studying in Brazil for the semester. It hurt her pride, too.“It was really depressing when (the dollar) fell below the loonie,” she said. “I have this Canadian roommate I hate, and after that happened, I lost a lot of arguments to him.”

As the dollar’s value against world currencies has fallen in the recent months, Brown students studying abroad are feeling the pinch. Stu-dents are working to stretch their money a little further, even if that means going out to eat less or trav-eling less.

Collins is eating in more and take fewer taxis while still trying to make the most of her time in Brazil, where a dollar trades for 1.79 Brazil-ian reais. Three years ago, Collins

would have gotten 2.67 Brazilian reais for one dollar. “I mean, when am I going to be in Brazil again?” she said. She also follows the exchange rate closely, making ATM withdraw-als only when the dollar is worth at least 1.75 Brazilian reais. She also tries to withdraw more money at once to reduce the number of times she has to pay the fine levied by her home bank, Bank of America. To avoid these fines, she is consider-ing opening an account with a bank in Brazil.

Despite the guidelines she set for herself, Collins said it can be hard to be thrifty. “If I need to buy some-thing, I’m just going to buy it with my credit card,” she said, adding that searching for goods at cheaper prices isn’t worth it.

For students studying in Europe, the problem is even worse. There,

MPAA says it blamed too much on studentsBy LESLIE PRIMACKStaff Writer

When it comes to the heated topic of movie piracy, it seems college students are not as criminal as the entertainment industry made them out to be.

The Motion Picture Association of America admitted last Wednes-day that it overestimated the money lost because of illegal file sharing among college students by almost 300 percent. In a 2005 study, the MPAA blamed college students for 44 percent of its losses — a number that has recently been readjusted to 15 percent.

“The numbers were wrong, and we thought they were wrong, but we couldn’t prove that,” said Con-nie Sadler, director of information technology security. She feels that piracy is nothing unique to colleges but that entertainment corporations often target college networks be-cause their high bandwidth makes downloading faster and because

student contact information is easy to access.

The MPAA’s study claimed a loss of $6.1 billion because of il-legal movie downloading and file

sharing, though most of the losses are attributed to piracy overseas. It attributed the miscalculation of

Students turn class into cash with BrunoBooksBy SOPhIA LISenior Staff Writer

Interested in saving money on text-books? Four undergraduates hope so — and they’re counting on it for the success of their new online business, BrunoBooks.com.

The Web site, which allows stu-dents from all over the country to compare Amazon.com’s best prices with those of their school book-stores, was created by four Brown undergraduates and begun as a class project for an entrepreneur-ship class last semester.

Despite a modest launch on Jan. 11, BrunoBooks creators Jesse

Maddox ’08, Herald Opinions Col-umnist Matt Prewitt ’08, Jonathan Rhone ’08 and Erik Resly ’08 have ambitious goals.

The Web site is already active at Brown, Boston University, the University of Illinois, the University of Texas at Austin, San Jose State University and the University of South Carolina.

The group of undergrads formed a financial relationship with Amazon, which pays the creators of BrunoBooks for every order filled through their site, allowing them

to provide their price-comparison service free of charge.

“I wouldn’t work on it if we were charging you more,” said Resly, who helped design the Web site. He said that would be contrary to the purpose of BrunoBooks — to make textbooks as cheap as pos-sible for students.

Resly emphasized that Bruno-Books.com is “for students, by students” and user-friendly.

“It’s easy. It’s simple,” Resly said. “You see what you get, and you get what you see.”

Rhone agreed, saying they

C u T , F o L d E d , d y E d & G L u E d

Courtesy of Brown.eduThe work of artist Jae Ko, on display at the david Winton Bell gallery until March 5th, is made out of paper.

See ArtS & Culture, pAge 3

Courtesy of state.govBrown’s chief IT security official, Connie Sadler, said she was not surprised the MPAA’s claims of how much money has been lost due to piracy were incorrect.

continued on page 4continued on page 4

continued on page 6 continued on page 6

harvard: Full tuition assistance for families with incomes below $60,000 and up to 90 percent assistance for families making less than $180,000

yale: More than halves tuition for needy students by promising an extra $24 million annually

Penn: Replaces all loans with grants for students eligible for financial aid

dartmouth: Adds need-blind admission for international stu-dents; waives tuition for families earning less than $75,000

Peers race to revamp aid packages

FEATURE

ToDay

The Brown Daily heralD

Editorial Phone: 401.351.3372Business Phone: 401.351.3260

Simmi Aujla, President

Ross Frazier, Vice President

Mandeep Gill, Treasurer

Darren Ball, Secretary

The Brown Daily Herald (USPS 067.740) is an independent newspaper serving the Brown

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ACROSS1 Curved path4 Stands guard,

perhaps9 Fern seed

14 Adriatic orAegean

15 Make a payment16 Asylum17 Drop in the

middle18 Best a real estate

tycoon?20 West Texas city

named byRussians

22 Like the fur seal23 Nevada gambling

mecca24 Tongue’s sense26 Moby Dick

chaser30 Cheap piece of

jewelry32 Leave no doubt

about34 Soda holder35 Out in the open38 Cell “messenger”39 Fauna’s partner41 Prefix with term

or life42 Frequently44 Chat room

guffaw45 Travelers’

documents47 Barrister’s field48 Cut down to size50 Correcting

manuscripts, e.g.54 Model’s stance55 Yucca fiber58 Sheltered, at sea59 Russell of

“AmericanGangster”

61 Flower fertilizer63 Underpay a

comic actor?67 Infamous Amin68 Conical abode69 Minute amount70 __ carte71 Poet William

Butler __72 Red deer73 Diner owner in

TV’s “Alice”

DOWN1 Put in order2 One enjoying a

book3 Lock up a movie

star?4 They can be fine

or liberal5 Scold6 Six-foot

Australian bird7 “The __ They Are

A-Changin’”:Dylan

8 Mar. 17thhonoree

9 Loafer orsneaker

10 Zoo animals withChinese names

11 Caesar’s eggs12 Seminary subj.13 Either extreme of

a loaf19 Bleak, in poetry21 Sub locator25 Tiny elemental

components27 Injure an actor?28 ‘’Rule, Britannia’’

composer29 Lima or fava31 Jack in a deck

33 Popular vodka,familiarly

36 By way of37 ’50s Ford flop39 Dr. Dentons

feature40 Gray wolf43 “__ Attraction”46 “Under wraps” is

one49 Under wraps, so

to speak51 Portray

52 Sewingimplement

53 Pleasantlycheerful

56 Mower’s path57 __ firma60 AAA suggestions62 Bills not found in

ATMs63 Porcine pen64 Bit of a titter65 __-Locka, Florida66 Sea dog

By David W. Cromer(c)2008 Tribune Media Services, Inc. 1/28/08

1/28/08

ANSWER TO PREVIOUS PUZZLE:

RELEASE DATE– Monday, January 28, 2008

Los Angeles Times Daily Crossword PuzzleEdited by Rich Norris and Joyce Nichols Lewis

[email protected]

C r o S S W o r d

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Fill in the grid so that every row, every column and every 3x3 box contains the digits 1 through 9.

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PAGE 2 THE BRoWN dAILy HERALd MoNdAy, JANuARy 28, 2008

But Seriously | Charlie Custer and Stephen Barlow

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gus vs. Them | Zachary McCune and Evan Penn

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arTs & CulTureMoNdAy, JANuARy 28, 2008 THE BRoWN dAILy HERALd PAGE 3

Korean heritage inspires abstract artworkExhibit open until March 5

By CAThERINE gOLdBERgStaff Writer

The works of artists Imi Hwangbo and Jae Ko are currently on display at the David Winton Bell Gallery in the show “Cut, Folded, Dyed & Glued,” which opened Friday. The two artists layer simple two-dimen-sional materials to create abstract three-dimensional sculptures that ignite the viewer’s curiosity.

Both artists draw upon their Korean heritage in their works. Hwangbo looks to the decorative arts of Korea, making reference to designs of “pojagi” — the cloths used for wrapping, covering, carry-ing and storing sacred and secular objects — and the vivid colors of “hanbok” — traditional Korean clothing.

Pojagi were the sole creative outlet of Korean women during the rigidly Confucian era of the Cho-son Dynasty (1392-1910). These small rectangular textiles are deco-rated with patchwork of geometric shapes or embroidered with bird and flower motifs, which carried symbolic meanings such as wealth, prosperity and abundance of mate-rial objects and male offspring.

Hwangbo’s adaptation of pojagi honors the skill and craft of her fe-male ancestors while also drawing

attention to their traditionally sub-ordinate role in Korean society.

Hwangbo creates decorative mo-tifs such as petaled flowers, simple and complex diamond patterns and elaborate filigree designs. These patterns are repeated, often over an entire surface, which ranges from six by eight inches to 11 feet long. Her entire design process involves several forms of media, combining drawing, printmaking and sculpture to create objects that appear as three-dimensional drawings.

The artist begins with a draw-ing she does by hand that is later translated into a computer draw-ing and printed in archival ink on sheets of translucent Mylar. Dur-ing the installation process, the pieces, which are composed of up to 30 layers, are aligned to create form, shape and depth. She hand cuts the individual layers, remov-ing rather than adding material to create her elaborate patterns. “The process of constructing volume through multiple layering creates a dialogue between positive and negative, interior and exterior, and visible and invisible form,” she said in her artist’s statement.

Jae Ko also draws upon tradi-tional Korean practices of paper-making and paper crafts in her work but focuses on their func-tional rather than decorative uses.

In Korea, paper was not used sim-ply for writing and drawing, but also for constructing material for objects such as chests, wardrobes and bowls. In her work at the Bell Gallery, Ko explores the versatil-ity of paper, presenting two very different kinds of work.

Her earlier pieces, created be-tween 1996 and 2005, are large, puffy wall reliefs made entirely of layers of paper. After shaping the layers into undulating forms, Ko soaked them in black sumi ink and water, causing the paper to swell and give the appearance of soft velvet shapes.

In contrast, Ko’s recent work manipulates paper to appear like hard plastic or fiberglass. She uses stacks of adding machine paper and twists them into curled ribbon-like shapes. The harshly coiled fig-ures are held together with shiny glue, giving them a mechanical quality. But because Ko has dyed the stacks of paper with blood-red calligraphic ink, they also seem to refer to something bodily or organ-ic. The artist left the work untitled, allowing the viewer’s curiosities and interpretations to roam.

The artists use simple materials to produce impressive creations of exquisite intricacy that will seduce and awe anyone in their presence. The show will be on display until March 5.

Dance exchange weaves, moves and praysBy ANdREA SAvdIEaSSiStant artS & Culture editor

During World War II, Japanese women practiced a tradition known as “senninbari,” which consisted of hand embroidering thousand-stitch belts for Japanese soldiers to wear in combat. These belts were especially unique because every single stitch was collected from a different woman of the community, representing a prayer for protec-tion. This practice of interweaving individual prayers inspired the first chapter of dance choreographer Liz Lerman’s project, “613 Radical Acts of Prayer.”

On Jan. 21, Lerman brought the project to Brown in the form of a two-week residency — the Liz Ler-man Dance Exchange Residency — that includes workshops, gal-lery shows, speeches, open talks and performances. Mirroring the concept of senninbari, Lerman’s approach to choreography is based on collaboratively creating art through conversation and spiri-tual contemplation. The concluding event of the residency will be a performance that features dances constructed by Lerman, students from Brown and the Rhode Island School of Design and Providence-area community members through-out the two weeks.

“613 Radical Acts of Prayer” covers two overarching themes — the relationship between dialogue and movement and the meaning of prayer, according to the project description. Through workshops, experimental activities and conver-sations, it explores the possibility that words can inspire movements, movements can tell stories and spirituality and social action can be reconciled.

The project description states that when activism and contempla-tive practice have come together

in the past, “it has led to some of our greatest and most heinous hu-man endeavors.” Thus, its goal is to transform the meaning of prayer since people are often uncomfort-able with the term in its traditional sense, said Shirah Rubin, director of engagement and special initia-tives at Brown-RISD Hillel.

“I’m not a very religious per-son, but I was raised a Unitarian Universalist,” said Laura Bayley ’10, one of the student dancers par-ticipating in the residency. “It’s a faith about questioning your beliefs and asking questions like what it means for something to be sacred and what it means to pray,” she said. “That’s what drew me to the project.”

The residency, which kicked off last week, has a number of spon-sors, including the Creative Arts Council, Brown-RISD Hillel and the Department of Theater, Speech and Dance. During the opening event — the Martin Luther King Jr. Day of Action Workshop — Ler-man and Dance Exchange mem-bers presented the themes of the project.

The program continued with an Interfaith Supper on Thursday, in which students and Providence-area community members were encouraged to share personal sto-ries. Pieces of these stories were then translated into movements, combining means of expression in an attempt to unite body and soul.

“It’s a very organic process,” said Jori Ketten ’02, who is part of the Residency Planning Com-mittee. “The majority of the movements you’ll see in the per-formances come out of the minds and bodies of the people involved. (The residency leaders) respond to their environment in the fullest sense.”

Rubin said the number 613

represents the total number of commandments in the Bible and symbolizes the relationship be-tween social action and ritual. The number also relates to the notions of counting and noticing actions, she said. For example, the dance exchange members lead an activ-ity in which members can have conversations about occasions when somebody has stood up for them or they have stood up for somebody else. “A gesture from the story will get borrowed and put into the dance piece,” Rubin said.

The residency will hold a gal-lery opening at Hillel this after-noon for an exhibit created by Brown and RISD students during the residency. Also on display at Hillel is an ongoing installation project — “A Wish and A Prayer” — by artist Pam Hall, who is in residence at RISD.

On Jan. 30, Lerman, a MacAr-thur “Genius Grant” fellow, will hold an open workshop in the RISD auditorium to present her critical response process, which includes “four steps for feedback on anything you make, from dance to dessert,” according to the motto for this arts criticism method. In-stead of viewing criticism as nega-tive, Ketten said, Lerman’s struc-tured process is aimed at creating constructive dialogue about art. To present her process, Lerman will critique works-in-progress performed by artists from Provi-dence’s Perishable Theater. Ler-man will also give a keynote speech on Jan. 31 with an introduction by Mayor David Cicilline ’83.

The residency’s concluding per-formance — its own embroidered belt made up of movements re-flecting individual prayers, stories and gestures — will be performed twice on Feb. 3 and also be part of the Brown Festival of Dance in May.

At play festival, saving yuppies and ‘Fishbowl’ed actorsBy ROBIN STEELEartS & Culture editor

This weekend the “Undergraduate Playwriting Festival” held staged readings of four original plays written by undergraduates in the packed upstairs space of the Pro-duction Workshop. The two-hour performance, which ran Friday and Saturday, began with “Escape from Quality Manor,” written and directed by Brendan Pelsue ’08. “Escape” recounts the tale of Craigue, a girl with debilitating obesity in the con-fines of a nursing home who suffers under the torment of her parents and pines for a boy who apparently re-quites her feelings. Craigue, played by Alice Winslow ’08, lends humor to the tragic tale with her dry, simple narrations.

The reading involved minimal staging, with Winslow sitting in front of a line-up of the supporting char-acters. Among the most entertain-ing of Craigue’s tormenters were Alexandra Panzer ’08 as Craigue’s cruel mother and Kyle Dacuyan ’11 as the unfeeling Nurse Daniel. The play comes to a head when the ob-ject of Craigue’s affection comes to spring her from the nursing home prison. Though, naturally, things do not go as anticipated, the ending was a bit disappointing — the closing message read like a public service announcement.

The second play of the evening — “Morgan’s Soul Food Cafe” — focused on an all-night coffee shop that might be purgatory and the pair of sassy waitresses just trying to save a few yuppie souls. This strong entry was written by Audrey Chait ’11 and directed by Emily Toner ’10. Andrea Dillon ’11 was particularly compelling as Gwen, the junior wait-ress and apprentice soul-saver who develops feelings for one of the yup-pie customers.

While most of the poor business-men enter and exit via the sinister trap door, it takes a rare hand to make it out the divine front door. This funny and clever play actually benefitted from the read stage direc-tions, which verbally acknowledged an “awkward pause” and “fourth wall moment.”

The third play, “Sunlight on Shad-ows,” written by Alice Huang ’10 and directed by Rich Ellis ’10 was the most serious script of quartet. The scenes teased out the ambigu-ous relationship between conflicted immigrant Mary (Marsida Domi ’10) and Lyla (Daria Marinelli ’10). Lyla is the blissfully imaginative blind woman who may be Mary’s neighbor, inner self or something else altogether. This relationship is clarified over the course of the performance, as the omnipotent authority seems to shift back and forth between the two women.

This play explored some inter-esting ideas, but it ran a little too long and featured too much verbal exposition from its characters. The depressing tale relied on sometimes cliche imagery and a would-be sin-ister nursery rhyme repetition that only served to undermine the spare, tragic mood of the scenes. But a passionate performance from Domi was compelling and, ultimately, the twisty ending worked, even if the au-dience may have seen it coming.

The darkest performance of the evening was followed by the light-est — “The Fishbowl Chronicles,”

written by Alex Rosenthal ’08 and directed by Dan Rogers ’08. In a set-up that crosses a game-show setting with a hilarious spoof of experimen-tal theater, the three main characters are, in fact, actors, who are wear-ing fishbowls over their heads. The actors — Alicia Coneys ’09, Adam Mazer ’08 and Justin O’Neill ’11 — continued to run through a series of lettered scenes, the order of which hinged on choices presented to the audience. According to “The Keeper” — Chrissie Bodznick ’10 — the audience must continue to choose scenes until they save the ac-tors, or the actors run out of air. The whole business is presided over by Bodznick, wielding a bell and clearly modeling herself on the “fabulous” Orbit gum spokeswoman.

The silly scenes, in which Mazer and O’Neill vie for Coneys’ affection

continued on page 4


somewhere.”“There is a scale dif ferential

that is pretty significant (between endowments) that is certainly a fac-tor,” Miller said. Brown “needs to remain competitive ... Timing isn’t as important as getting it right.”

Miller added that it still remains unclear what the new financial aid policy will be, “but it may have a real influence on where people at-tend.”

One argument in support of in-creasing financial aid spending is to draw in more low- and middle-income students. Miller said that Brown’s past financial-aid initia-tives, such as the Sidney E. Frank Endowed Scholarship Fund, had a significant impact on the socioeco-nomic demographic of students.

“Traditionally students from the bottom half of the income quartile are underrepresented,” Miller said. “These (new policies) will certainly help to change that pattern.”

U. ponders more financial aidcontinued from page 1

BrunoBooks born out of class project

aimed to make the service “as transparent as possible” and give students all of the information they need to decide where to buy their books.

The group said their own experi-ences with the Brown Bookstore inspired the idea for the Web site.

“I have spent a lot more money in my time at Brown than I could have if I had shopped around,” Pre-witt said. “There’ll always be a need for a bookstore, but that doesn’t give them a right to have a monopoly on students’ purchasing decisions.”

Prewitt added that they want BrunoBooks to become “serious competition for the bookstores.”

Maddox and Prewitt developed their idea and business plan further in ENGN 1010: “The Entrepreneur-ial Process: Innovation in Practice,” an entrepreneurship class taught by Danny Warshay, adjunct lecturer in engineering.

Warshay described Maddox and Prewitt’s plan as “different from the norm” for his class, which usually asks students to submit budget pro-posals of at least $3 million.

“I constantly push my students to think big,” Warshay said. He said his feedback may have encouraged Maddox and Prewitt to include ad-ditional campuses in their vision for BrunoBooks.

“The class teaches you how to analyze a business opportunity and figure out whether or not it’s a real opportunity,” Prewitt said.

Maddox agreed that the class was helpful because it forced them to “rigorously think through every

aspect of the service.”After further developing their

business plan and placing fourth in two “elevator pitch” competitions in November, Maddox and Prewitt se-cured the financial backing of alum Ari Goodstein ’07 and worked hard over the winter break to put their plan into action.. Rhone and Resly created the Web site while Maddox and Prewitt advertised the service to students in Texas and Illinois.

“It’s hard to get the word out be-cause we’re competing with so many other things for people’s attention,” Maddox said.

In addition to posters and fly-ers, the team has created Facebook groups to spread the word — and the budding entrepreneurs are adding a special incentive for students to join the group and invite their friends.

The group plans to select two students from the “BrunoBooks.com at Brown” Facebook group on Feb. 10. One will pick a charity to which BrunoBooks will donate 10 percent of the profit made from Brown students’ orders. The other will receive $50 in cash, and whoever invited him or her to the group will receive $150.

“Nobody’s going to join a Face-book group for a business,” Maddox said. “You’ve got to make it exciting if you want to spread the word that way,” Prewitt added.

As of Sunday night, the Facebook group at Brown had 667 members — the BU group is a distant second with 116 — and Maddox estimated that there have been 1,000 visitors to the Web site from Brown students alone.

“Per capita we’re doing much

better at Brown than at these other schools, partly because these oth-er schools are enormous,” Prewitt said.

So far, reviews of the service have been mixed.

Jamila Woods ’11 liked the ser-vice so much that she recommended to her friend, Sonika Hegde ’11.

“Use BrunoBooks.com,” Woods said. “I saved forty dollars.”

Cecilia Pineda ’11 wasn’t as im-pressed.

“They didn’t have all the books you needed,” she said. Pineda tried to find her books for BIOL 0500: “Cell and Molecular Biology” on BrunoBooks. It listed one of the books she needed, but not “Essen-tial Cell Biology,” the class’s primary textbook.

“They had the majority of the books I was looking for, but not ev-erything,” Pineda said.

The “four enterprising young lads,” as they describe themselves on the Web site, are by no means done with BrunoBooks. They said their plans for the future include widening the selection of booksell-ers and incorporating a textbook exchange.

Eventually, they want Bruno-Books.com to become a “one-stop shop, the place to go for all your textbook needs,” Prewitt said.

But Maddox said the quartet tries not to take themselves too seriously. As of press time, the bot-tom of the site’s course selection menu featured a class in Brown’s lesser-known “Pimpin” department — PIMP 101: “How to Be a Playa” with Dr. Jesse Maddox. “It’s only a class for one student.”

continued from page 1

while wearing implied “fishbowls” topped by funny hats, hinged on arbitrary decisions made by the audience. Often the same scenes were repeated again and again, in-cluding a hilarious song-and-dance

number composed by “Anonymous,” while the actors became increas-ingly anxious and distracted due to their depleting air supplies. As the situation became increasingly dire, an act of intervention by a clever audience member managed to save the day.

Audience saves actors

Indonesian dictator passes away at 86


beings. We also pray for the family to be strong, and look ahead for better future,” the president said.

Suharto expanded Indonesia’s territory by force and guile, annex-ing the territories of Papua and East Timor and brutally suppressing the independence movement in the prov-

ince of Aceh in a conflict that lasted 27 years.

The estimates of the number of people killed by Suharto’s regime “vary from 300,000 to 2 million, but the exact number nobody knows,” said Asmara Nababan, former sec-retary general of Indonesia’s Human Rights Commission. “It created a big wound in society, and even today it is not completely gone.”

But long before Suharto’s death, Indonesians were working to build a democracy from the rubble of his regime, which collapsed in 1998 amid nationwide protests and riots sparked by an economic meltdown across the region.

Under a carefully managed com-promise, the Indonesian military re-tained its dominance over politics behind the scenes in exchange for allowing democratic reforms.

After Suharto was ousted, Indo-nesia’s radical Islamic movement gained new strength, but the softer approach has slowly shown results. There have been fewer high-profile attacks in recent years.

Suharto preferred an iron hand. He not only crushed Indonesia’s Communist Party but also sup-pressed Islamic extremists, forcing the most militant clerics into exile.

During his rule, Suharto is credited with stimulating economic growth, cutting the annual inflation rate from 600 percent to 6.5 percent and raising personal income from an average of $70 a year to $1,300. The number of Indonesians living in dire poverty fell from 56 percent to 12 percent, and literacy rates and average life spans rose.

At the same time, he divvied up the nation’s wealth among his six children and his cronies, amassing a family fortune estimated at $40 billion. The system of government

by kleptocracy that flourished under Suharto has plagued the country ever since.

Teten Masduki, coordinator of Indonesia Corruption Watch, said Suharto plundered Indonesia’s forests, mineral resources, oil and agriculture. He set trade policies to benefit his financial empire, gave his cronies control of banks and sold off the country’s assets.

By 1997, Indonesia’s economy was too fragile to survive the region’s economic collapse.

Small demonstrations by students started in February 1998, with a call for economic and political reform. The protests grew, attracting profes-sionals and academics.

The shooting of six students by security forces in Jakarta on May 12, 1998, sparked riots that claimed 500 lives. Nine days later, Suharto an-nounced his resignation and handed over power to Vice President B.J. Habibie.

Suharto at that point had ruled In-donesia for more than half the coun-try’s existence and had remained in power longer than any sitting head of state except Cuba’s Fidel Castro.

Many of his critics were disap-pointed that he was never put on trial. The government’s inability to hold Suharto accountable, they said, set back Indonesia’s recovery from three decades of authoritar-ian rule.

“The most important thing,” Masduki said, “was a verdict from this country that ... kleptocracy was wrong, that the way he did business was wrong and the way he treated human rights was wrong, so that Indonesia won’t repeat it in the fu-ture.”

Suharto’s wife, Siti Hartinah, died in 1996. Suharto is survived by three sons and three daughters.


Campus newsMoNdAy, JANuARy 28, 2008 THE BRoWN dAILy HERALd PAGE 5

Former Professor of Engineering Choon Fong Shih was named the founding president of King Abdullah university of Science and Technology this month. Shih, currently the president of the National university of Singapore, will assume his duties as KAuST’s president dec. 1.

Ali Ibrahim Al-Naimi, the Saudi oil minister and chairman of the board of trustees at KAuST, cited Shih’s work building the National university of Singapore into a world-class university as a reason for the hire, according to a press release. Shih, a Harvard alum, moved to Singapore in 1996 after 15 years of teaching at Brown. He became president in 2000.

Neither Shih nor KAuST officials could be reached for comment.KAuST is an international, graduate-level research university estab-

lished by King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia. The university, set to open in 2009, is “dedicated to inspiring a new age of scientific achievement in the kingdom that will also benefit the region and the world,” according to its Web site.

KAuST will not establish schools or departments but will be organized instead into interdisciplinary research institutes. Four have been estab-lished so far, including a Materials Science and Engineering Institute, and each contains various research centers and programs within its field.

At Brown, Shih worked in the division of Engineering researching the field of fracture mechanics. Fracture mechanics researchers study the performance of cracked bodies under stress. Shih has published some 150 articles in scientific journals and has been awarded both the Swedlow Award and the George Irwin Medal by the American Society for Testing and Materials, according to his biography on the National university of Singapore’s Web site.

Shih’s former colleagues remember him as a genial professor. “He was a very outgoing, social guy. Very good with his students,” said Allan Bower, professor of engineering. Bower, who worked on a joint paper with Shih, called him a “very active researcher.”

Janet Blume, associate professor of engineering, who spent nearly a decade working with Shih, said, “He was excellent here.” She described Shih as “wonderfully unassuming” and “down to earth,” so humble that she was surprised when he took the “enormously huge” job as the president of the National university of Singapore.

Blume also praised Shih’s devotion to his students and reports that she and Shih keep in touch. “He’s a great guy,” she said.

— Patrick Corey

former prof. to head new Saudi university

n e W S i n B r i e f

Insurance co-payments as low as $12 deter some older women from receiving mammograms, according to recent research by Amal Trivedi. an assistant professor of community health. The research was published last week in the New England Journal of Medicine and covered by ABC News and the Wall Street Journal.

over a 10-year period, two to six of every 1,000 women screened could have their lives saved by mammography, according to estimates in an article published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2003.

Trivedi, along with other researchers at Brown and one from Har-vard, examined data compiled on 366,475 women aged 65 to 69 from Medicare managed care-plans from 2001 to 2004. They discovered that the women whose plans required a co-payment were 8.3 percent less likely to be screened than those whose insurance plans covered the full cost.

Trivedi said that “the magnitude of the effect” surprised him, since even modest co-payments were seriously deterring older women from receiving this necessary preventative test.

Trivedi researched mammography because it’s a “very valuable preventative health service” and because extensive studies on the topic already exist. “There has been lots of research done on this in the past and it is generally accepted to be a very necessary thing for women,” he said.

The researchers hope that the findings will disseminate to Medicare health plans, “so they are aware that modest co-payments can have a substantial negative effect on breast cancer spending rates,” Trivedi said.

The screening rate among even the women with full coverage plans was still only 77.5 percent, indicating other barriers exist besides pay-ment. Lack of a local mammography facility, education on mammogram’s benefits and a doctor’s recommendation that a given woman have the test are also obstacles, according to Trivedi. But co-payment remains “a substantial deterrent and one that can be eliminated,” he stressed.

The research also suggested that elderly women are particularly af-fected by co-payments. “They have a fixed income so they don’t have as much money to pay out of pocket,” Trivedi explained.

The study concluded that, “For effective preventive services such as mammography, exempting elderly adults from cost sharing may be warranted.” Trivedi said he hopes to see legislation passed to make mammograms free to elderly women. “We think that would be a valu-able policy implication of our studies and that eliminating co-payments for mammograms could save lives,” he said.

In light of these findings, Trivedi intends to study other tests, such as those for colon cancer screening, people with diabetes and people who have a history of heart disease.

— Jacob Tower

Mammogram fees deter women from testing

Community college transfer seeks brethren

Courtesy of nus.edu.sg

Choon Fong Shih

By ALLISON WENTzContriButing Writer

A professor at Rio Hondo Commu-nity College told Eric Rodriguez ’08 not to bother applying as a transfer student to Brown. But he did anyway, and after enrolling in 2006, he is one of the small number of transfer students who come to College Hill from community colleges.

Now, as a student, Rodriguez is trying to help increase that number. During the 2006-07 winter break, Ro-driguez went back to the Rio Hondo and other community colleges in Southern California to speak to stu-dents about transferring to Brown — all on his own initiative.

At the schools where he spoke, Rodriguez said he felt that the stu-dents received him well. In Southern California, Rodriguez said, “Stan-ford and CalTech never step foot on community college.” Rodriguez is not an official recruiter, though the University allowed him to speak as a volunteer at the meetings. Still, he said he felt that “it meant something to (the students) that they had a ‘representative’ from Brown.”

The small number of students who transfer to Brown from com-munity colleges is not due to lack of effort on the part of the University, Rodriguez said.

Unlike the students to whom Ro-driguez spoke, community college administrations were not always re-ceptive. “The experience was pretty eye opening. A lot of people tend to put the blame on universities like

Brown for not recruiting students from community college.”

But he added that a larger reason was that “some of these (commu-nity) colleges don’t even want me to come and talk.” Colleges “have pipelines already established” as to where they will send their students, he explained, based on where the students have the greatest chance getting accepted and where they have had the most success academi-cally.

The community colleges in Cali-fornia send most of the students into the University of California system — the applications are readily avail-able for those wishing to transfer from a community college to a UC school. But the transfer application process to an out-of-state or an Ivy League university can be more complex and require much more research, Rodriguez said.

Despite the obstacles, Rodriguez made it to College Hill and said he loves it. “I transferred to Brown because of the academic freedom afforded to students. You can study whatever you want and there’s a tre-mendous amount of people here who are willing to guide you to whatever you’re interested in,” he said. The financial aid he received was also a major factor in his decision to apply to transfer to Brown.

Rodriguez is applying for jobs and fellowships to begin when moves back to California after graduating in May. “I am really satisfied with my experience here. Academically, I’ve been challenged,” the international relations concentrator said. “Socially, I’ve been able to interact with people from all walks of life. I’ve learned so much from my classmates that I don’t think I would have gotten elsewhere.”


one dollar is equal to .68 euros as of Sunday evening. Three years ago, a student in Europe could trade .77 euros for one dollar.

“It’s definitely something ev-erybody’s noticing,” said Ashley Lopez ’09, who is studying in Paris. “Everybody is keeping tabs on the exchange rate.”

Lopez has made a number of changes to her daily life as a result of the weak dollar. She is “definite-ly eating out less” and is careful about where she shops. She said her American friends studying abroad in Paris “are willing to go out of their way to get stuff done so that they don’t spend as much.” She relies heavily on the subway system, and is trying to learn about

the night buses that run after the subway closes so that she can avoid taking taxis. “The (taxi) rates go skyrocket high, because they know clearly there are safety problems. But even then people are choosing not to get a cab,” she said.

Lopez said she felt the effects of the exchange rate immediately. “We just got here, so we’re still in tourist mode,” she said. “But we’re still very aware of our spending.” She has also scaled back her travel plans. “Definitely, people are think-ing about traveling closer,” she said, though none of her friends has planned travel yet. “Everyone’s just being really careful with their money.”

Edward Tang ’09, who is study-ing in Oxford, England, said most students he knows aren’t acting that

differently. “Most of the visiting stu-dents here I know understand that things are just more expensive here to begin with anyway,” Tang wrote in an e-mail to The Herald. “It’s a little hard not to spend money here since everything isn’t taken care of for you like at Brown.” He added that many students have stopped thinking about the exchange rate since there isn’t anything they can do about it. Instead of comparing prices between Oxford and Provi-dence, Tang now compares prices for items in different stores in Ox-ford, he said. (A dollar in Britain fetched .51 pounds yesterday, ver-sus .53 pounds three years ago.)

Mika Lin ’09, who is also abroad in Paris, said the exchange rate makes an already expensive city even more costly. “Overall the un-

favorable dollar-euro exchange rate has been unpleasant,” she wrote in an e-mail to The Herald. “The impact of (Americans’) decreased purchasing power is fairly obvious — people travel less frequently and to less-exotic places and they are less apt to go out to restaurants or bars.” She said that a single drink at an upscale bar can be 20 euros, or almost $30, and that even a cheap bar will sell beer for at least four euros, or nearly $6.

Lin said the silver lining to the weak dollar might be the lessons imparted on Americans abroad about budgeting and finance. Now, she added, people might be driven to explore something they might not have otherwise experienced, making study abroad less of “a eu-phemism for endless partying.”

Dollar’s downfall tightens wallets for students abroad

student piracy to “human error,” without elaborating.

“They’re going to try to do things that they can get away with,” said Joe Larios ’10, treasurer of the Brown Film Society and a Herald comic art-ist. “The higher the figure that you can use with your lobbies in Con-gress, the easier it is to get legislation in your favor.”

The MPAA is currently pushing for laws to make universities crack down harder on piracy within their networks. But this new statistic sug-gests that on-campus solutions to piracy would affect only a small per-centage of the MPAA’s profits.

“I don’t think it’s really a case of individuals wanting to steal intellec-tual property,” Sadler said. “It’s more of a case of consumers wanting to get content quickly and at a reason-able price.”

She said the range of download options often leave consumers un-sure what is legal and what is not. Sadler, like many Brown students, feels that the current ways of legally buying media do not meet consum-ers’ expectations of convenience.

Larios said legally bought mu-sic and movies are often inferior to their illegally obtained counterparts because corporations limit the ways in which the purchased files can be used. For example, he pointed to soft-ware on DVDs that prevents people from copying movies to a computer or another DVD. Songs bought from Apple’s iTunes music store can only be played on five computers.

“It’s just easier to download it (illegally),” said Osmar Olivo ’11. “They’re prosecuting the kids who are doing this stuff, but there are def-initely people that are doing worse things. You see all the rock stars and movie stars — they’re still living in these huge houses. They aren’t being hurt very much by the money.”

“We have a responsibility to have policies and procedures … that comport with the law, and you can’t shield anybody from that,” said Russell Carey ‘91 MA’06, interim vice president for campus life and student services.

The Herald reported April 12 that the Recording Industry Association of America sued 12 Brown students for illegally downloading music. Carey explained private suits are out of the University’s hands but that complaints of piracy to the Univer-sity often result in a warning sent to students and temporary suspension of their Internet access.

Since September 2007, 76 per-cent of the total piracy complaints received by the University have been about music, not video. But Sadler said that last year, she saw more complaints regarding video than music.

The Office of Student Life and Computing and Information Services work together to provide free enter-tainment such as IPTV and Ruckus, an online music service. Although Ruckus is free, it limits the usage of its music files — songs must be played on a computer and cannot be copied to a CD or played on an iPod.

Many students expressed a desire for a service that would provide un-limited music or movie downloads for a flat yearly rate. “We’re really in the midst of a revolution here in terms of content management,” said Sadler, “and there a lot of things to be decided before this problem is solved.”

Fewer students pirating than suspected



worlD & naTionMoNdAy, JANuARy 28, 2008 THE BRoWN dAILy HERALd PAGE 7

After Obama win, Democrats look forward to Feb. 5By dAN BALz, ANNE E. KORNBLUT ANd ShAILAgh MURRAyWaShington PoSt

CHARLESTON, S.C. — Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois won the South Carolina primary in a landslide Sat-urday, attracting a biracial coalition and giving his candidacy a much-needed boost as the Democratic presidential race moves toward a 22-state showdown on Feb. 5.

Obama trounced Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York in the first Southern primary of the 2008 campaign, with former Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina finish-ing third. After a bitter and racially charged campaign in which former President Bill Clinton became the center of controversy, Obama won with overwhelming support from African Americans, but also attracted about a quarter of the white vote, according to exit polling.

Obama’s big victory margin means the battle for the Democratic nomination continues without a clear front-runner. Obama and Clinton have now split the first four contests of the campaign, and the candidates face the possibility of an extended conflict that aides in both campaigns said Saturday could stretch into March or even April.

Clinton currently leads in a num-ber of the biggest states with con-tests on Feb. 5, including California and New York, and her campaign has predicted that she will emerge from the competition that day with a lead in convention delegates. Obama has set his sights on winning more states than Clinton on Feb. 5 and in preventing her from jumping into a big lead in the battle for delegates.

Clinton’s campaign had antici-pated a loss in South Carolina and sought throughout the week to play down the significance of the vote here. But the size of Obama’s vic-tory margin was far larger than her advisers or any pre-primary poll had anticipated, as Obama demonstrated an ability to energize his supporters on a day when turnout appeared likely to break the previous record for a Democratic primary.

Clinton left the state shortly after the polls closed and issued a written statement in which she congratu-lated Obama. But she signaled the fierce battle ahead by saying, “We now turn our attention to the mil-lions of Americans who will make their voices heard in Florida and the twenty-two states as well as American Samoa who will vote on February 5th.”

“He won fair and square,” Bill Clinton told supporters in Missouri on Saturday night.

Edwards, who won South Caro-lina four years ago, appeared to capi-talize on the bickering between the Clinton and Obama, winning nearly half of the white voters who made up their minds in the final three days. But after three consecutive third-place finishes, he now must decide whether continuing his candidacy will result in him becoming a poten-tial power broker or a spoiler.

Black voters made up slightly more than half of the Democratic electorate on Saturday, and Obama won about four in five of their votes. Months earlier, he and Clinton were in a pitched battle for the support of black voters, with Clinton hoping to draw on her and her husband’s deep roots in the African American com-munity. But Obama quickly consoli-dated their support, and his superior organization provided an extra boost

that paid off on voting day.Clinton made a special effort to

attract support from African Ameri-can women, but they were as strong in their support for Obama as were African American men. Obama de-feated Clinton among black women 4 to 1.

Edwards siphoned off a consid-erable portion of the white vote on Saturday. Exit polls by the National Election Pool showed Edwards and Clinton each winning about four in 10 white voters, with Obama gaining the rest. But Edwards found virtu-ally no support within the African American community, with exit polls showing that he gained about 2 per-cent of the black vote.

The South Carolina campaign turned into the nastiest stage of the Democratic nomination battle so far. Clinton and Obama traded insults during a rancorous debate in Myrtle Beach on Monday night, and the two campaigns clashed repeatedly over whether the Clintons — and, in particular, the former president — were deliberately distorting some of Obama’s statements for political advantage.

The attacks raged through much of the week, until Clinton and Obama backed away from the brink on Thursday, but by then the damage was done. The results of the primary were “a sound rejection of the politics of attack and division by the voters of south Carolina,” David Plouffe, Obama’s campaign manager, said shortly after the polls closed.

Clinton advisers held firm in their argument that it was the Obama campaign that had sought to undermine the former president, and predicted the battle in South Carolina would damage Obama go-ing forward.

By 7:37 p.m., barely half an hour after the polls closed, Clinton was in the air headed toward Nashville, her campaign’s eagerness to leave South Carolina barely disguised. Although her strategists took care not to pub-licly disparage the voters of South

Carolina — as they had caucusgoers after losing Iowa weeks earlier — the private assessment from some supporters was that Obama had only won because of large minor-ity turnout. The Obama campaign quickly refuted that argument, not-ing that he had solid support in the white community, as well, and the argument seemed certain to roil the campaign further.

The Clinton team hopes to blunt some of Obama’s South Carolina momentum on Tuesday in Florida. That primary is not sanctioned by the Democratic National Committee and therefore will elect no delegates to the national convention. But more Democrats are expected to vote in that contest than in any previous primary or caucuses, and Clinton’s campaign is seeking a public rela-tions boost there.

Obama advisers believe that the size of his victory in South Carolina, after a spirited campaign among the three candidates, will count for more than a Florida contest in which the candidates have not actively cam-paigned because of the DNC sanc-tions.

The real battle will be the nearly two dozen states that vote on Feb. 5. Almost 1,700 delegates are at stake that day — slightly more than half of the pledged delegates to the Denver convention — and the two campaigns will throw enormous resources into the battle.

“Obama’s given himself another chance,” said Democratic pollster Mark Mellman, who is unaffiliated. “The question is: How big a bounce does he get out of this? He’s going into Super Tuesday behind in a number of major states. ... He gives himself a chance to get back in the game in a serious way.”

The exit polls showed Obama winning a majority of both men and women in South Carolina and win-ning most categories of voters. But there were clear racial splits, with African Americans solidly behind Obama and white voters divided among the three candidates.

But on one measure, there was agreement across racial lines: About seven in 10 white voters said they would be satisfied if Obama be-comes the nominee, and the same proportion of African Americans would be happy with Clinton as the party’s choice.

However, there were differences in levels of enthusiasm. More than eight in 10 black voters would be “very satisfied” with Obama as the party’s nominee, while 38 percent of white voters said they would be that happy. Forty-six percent of whites said they would be very satisfied if Clinton were the nominee, as did 34 percent of blacks.

Inside the Obama campaign, a nervous energy built in the final days here. Internally, the numbers continued to look solid, but advisers feared that the arguments with the Clintons would tarnish Obama’s im-age as he prepared to pivot to Feb. 5. But as Saturday unfolded, concern gave way to elation. At about 4 p.m., Obama emerged from his downtown Columbia hotel wearing sweats and basketball shoes, headed to a local gym to play with a group of Secret Service agents and staffers.

South Carolina political veterans said Obama’s ground organization was one of the best they had seen, consisting of 9,000 volunteers and nearly 150 voting day staging areas. His operation overlooked no poten-tial source of votes. For example, an aggressive vote-by-mail program helped to drive up absentee Demo-cratic ballots in Richland County, home to the state capital of Colum-bia, to nearly 8,000, compared with less than 1,000 in 2004.

Most significantly, Obama vir-tually swept the African American vote despite rejecting typical tactics deployed in the South, including pay-ing “street money” to local leaders and community organizers to get people to the polls. Obama campaign officials bragged about bucking this long-entrenched system, but they weren’t certain until Saturday whether it would work.

Indonesia’s Suharto dies at 86By RIChARd C. PAddOCK ANd PAUL WATSONloS angeleS tiMeS

JAKARTA, Indonesia — Former Presi-dent Suharto, an army general who rose to power in Indonesia with the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of people and ruled for 32 years over an era of rapid economic growth and extraordinary graft, died Sunday in Indonesia. He was 86.

Suharto’s unyielding opposition to communism won him the backing of the United States during the height of the Cold War, although he was one of the most brutal and corrupt rulers of that era. He governed the world’s fourth-most-populous nation with a combination of paternalism and ruthlessness from 1965 until he was ousted in spring 1998.

Like many Javanese, Suharto went by only one name. He had been in poor health for years after suffering several strokes and other ailments. He was rushed to the hospital Jan. 4 with anemia and low blood pressure.

Suharto surprised his doctors, and the nation, last week by overcoming a blood infection and making what one physician called a miraculous recovery. But his health suddenly took a turn for the worse again, and by Sunday morning, he had suffered multiple organ failure for a second time.

As Suharto drifted in and out of consciousness, his family gave doc-tors permission to take him off life support.

Declaring a week of mourning, President Susilo Bambang Yud-hoyono asked all Indonesians to “pay the highest respect to one of the best sons of the nation.

“I’m asking all Indonesian to pray for him, for his dedication and ser-vice to the country, and to human

continued on page 4

their bad start when they faced Lehigh later in the evening, but once again, the Bears failed to win the close matches, allowing Lehigh to take control of the match. The team lost all seven matches from the first weight class, at 125, until 174 pounds.

“We lost a lot of close matches,” Clark said. “We could have won any of the first five weight classes. Although the scores don’t show (their effort), the guys did a good job.”

At this point, 184-pounder Matt Gevelinger ’09 came out with great intensity and went after his oppo-nent right from the whistle. His first takedown revived the audience and gave the team back its energy. Gevelinger won the first point for the team after he defeated Kadeem Samuels, 8-3.

The most exciting match, how-

ever, was in the 197-pound weight class. Stearns got on the mat and wrestled aggressively from the start.

“I was really happy that Matt won and I was excited to get on the mat,” Stearns said. “It was a rough night for us because a lot of close matches didn’t go our way, so I wanted to go out there and make a statement for the team.”

In the blink of an eye, Stearns took down his opponent and caught him in a cradle with his opponent’s back on the mat. The audience sud-denly went wild, shouting “Pin! Pin! Pin!” At 45 seconds into the match, the referee blew the whistle as Stearns got the first and only win by fall of the day.

“When I caught (my opponent) on his back, I thought I already had taken him down and just went for it,” Stearns said.

Stearns was injured in July af-ter his freshman year and was out

of competition all of last year. Al-though he continued practicing and conditioning with the team, he said the first few matches of the season were tough for him.

But since then, Stearns has shown a lot of improvements and performed well, and he is “really happy about that.”

As a veteran on the team, Stearns thinks the team needs to get more physical on the mats.

“A lot of the guys have shown improvements. The team has had some ups and downs. If we can get more physical out there and work on small things like positioning, then we will be good to go,” Stearns said.

Stearns says his win by fall is a huge momentum boost for him. He also hopes the team can carry that momentum into the rest of the duals for the season.

“We will dual against Princeton and Boston University next. We ex-pect to dominate Princeton again this year. Last year, we had a disap-pointing loss to BU. We want to beat them this time,” Stearns said.

The team has a week to prepare for next weekend as they host three more dual matches in the Pizzitola Center.

“The guys know what they need to work on, and we just need to fine-tune their techniques,” Clark said. “And sometimes that takes some time.”

On Friday, the Bears will first wrestle against Princeton at 1 p.m., then Boston at 3 p.m. They will come back to the Pitz again on Saturday to face off against another Ivy League opponent, the Univer-sity of Pennsylvania, at 2 p.m.


“It was definitely a must-win game,” said Skrelja afterward.

The game was a match-up be-tween two teams considered to be title contenders. The buzzing atmosphere at the Pizzitola Center reflected that, as Yale brought its marching band and a few hundred fans to counter the Brown Men’s Basketball Alumni Day crowd.

But Yale (7-9 overall, 1-1 Ivy League), picked to finish second in the league in the preseason poll, didn’t play like a contender for much of the first half. Brown (9-7, 1-1) jumped off to a 21-10 lead after guard Mark McAndrew ’08 and swingman Peter Sullivan ’11 each hit a pair of three-pointers. After Huffman hit his own three, the Bears had their big-gest lead of the night, 32-16, with 5:10 left in the half.

But Yale closed the half on an 11-0 run, with Flato hitting three consecu-tive three-pointers in that stretch. The run ended when Matt Kyle, a 6-foot-11 center, stole a McAndrew pass and glided in for an uncontested dunk. Though Yale was down 32-27 at halftime, the Yale band blared as the teams headed to the locker room, a sign that the momentum had shifted over to the Bulldogs.

After the halftime break, the Bull-dogs slowly made up the five-point deficit by swatting away Brown shots and hitting their own. They finally took a 42-40 lead with 12:10 left in the game.

But a minute later, with the game tied at 44-44, Skrelja and Braswell fought for a loose ball in front of the Yale bench. Then, according to Skrel-ja, Braswell shoved him. Skrelja ap-peared to shove him back, and both

players had to be restrained by their respective teammates. Head Coach Craig Robinson started screaming, apparently for a technical on Bras-well, and seemed on the verge of get-ting a technical himself. Play stopped for a couple of minutes, and during a media timeout shortly afterward, the crowd was eerily quiet for a tie game.

But after the timeout, the Bears seemed charged, with Adrian Wil-liams ’11 and Skrelja hitting two quick lay-ups. The Bears took a 52-46 lead and then, with 6:10 remaining in the game, Huffman hit a three-pointer while getting fouled, sending the crowd screaming. He completed the four-point play, and Brown was ahead 61-52.

“It just brought a different energy to the game,” said Huffman, a team captain, of Skrelja and Braswell’s al-tercation. “It kind of lit a fire under the guys.”

But at the three-minute mark, Brown almost blew the lead it had quickly gained. With the score 68-58, Yale scored six points in a 17-second span, when Yale’s full-court pressure forced two Brown turnovers. But Brown was able to score on its next two possessions, on a Huffman drive and a short Sullivan jumper, while taking time off the clock. Brown hit five out of six free throws in the final minute to seal the win.

After the game, both head coaches said they were not concerned about their players’ conduct on the court. Yale Head Coach James Jones said, “That’s the way it’s supposed to be played,” and that emotions were run-ning especially high because of the high stakes of the game. Robinson said he was glad that his players stood up to Yale’s “roughness.”

Skrelja was a bit more blunt.“I have the utmost respect for

Yale,” Skrelja said, “and they just came into the game and didn’t show us the same respect.”

Next up, the men’s basketball team will play Cornell and Columbia at home this weekend. Cornell (10-5 overall, 2-0 Ivy), picked to win the league in the preseason poll, swept its series with Columbia (7-10, 0-2).

The Bears might have to play the New York teams without one of their captains. Mark MacDonald ’08 left just 37 seconds into the game after colliding with Skrelja. He said he hit his face against the side of Skrelja’s head while transitioning to offense. He fell and lay facedown for about 10 seconds, during which he said he was knocked out. He was then taken to the trainer’s room, where he was diagnosed with a mild concussion. MacDonald said he would see a doc-tor tomorrow to take more tests, and was unclear when he would be able to play again.

Game NotesMatt Mullery ’10 replaced Mac-

Donald and had eight points, eight re-bounds and two blocks in 28 minutes. ... Skrelja showed Brown fans a new look shooting free throws: He now takes them one-handed. After Skrelja made just 3-of-7 free throws during the Dec. 9 Providence College game, Robinson told him to shoot them one-handed. “I do what he tells me to do,” Skrelja said. ... After the game, Robinson said he would head home to watch the results for the South Carolina Democratic primaries to come in. He is campaigning for his brother-in-law, Barack Obama. “I’m hoping for two wins today,” he said. He came out on top in both arenas.

After shoves, m. hoops wins ‘must-win game’ continued from page 12

Wrestlers win one, lose two duals at home

girls to perform well and reach high expectations.

The girls have three more home meets before the end of the season. They will return to the Pitz next Sunday to host the Ocean State Challenge at 1 p.m. against

the University of Rhode Island and Rhode Island College.

The team will be back in ac-tion this Friday night when they travel to the University of New Hampshire to compete against New Hampshire, the University of Alaska and Bridgeport once again.


Gymnastics finishes third over weekend in first meet

Kenyan ethnic violence may be spreadingBy EdMUNd SANdERSloS angeleS tiMeS

NAIROBI, Kenya -- Naivasha, one of Kenya’s most popular vacation spots and a onetime playground for British colonialists, on Sunday became the latest city to suffer from ethnic clashes, raising fears that the violence is spreading into previously calm areas.

As many as 30 people were killed in the lakeside city, accord-ing to opposition leaders, who blamed the attacks on Kikuyu supporters of President Mwai Kibaki. The violence in Naivasha appeared to be in response to clashes last week in the nearby city of Nakuru, where as many as 50 Kikuyus were killed and hundreds of homes burned.

Gangs of Kikuyus, who sup-ported fellow tribesman Kibaki in a disputed Dec. 27 election, took out their anger Sunday by attacking rival tribes in Naivasha, burning homes in slum areas and setting up roadblocks along the main highway to Nairobi.

“This is not even about the election,” said Redemta Haoth, 36, a flower farmworker and member of the Luo tribe, which has generally supported opposi-tion leader Raila Odinga. “This is ethnic cleansing.”

Haoth and her two children fled their home after neighbors warned her that Kikuyu gangs were planning to rampage the district Sunday night. She spent the night with hundreds of other frightened people at Naivasha’s police station. Many opted to sleep in the town’s prison when space ran out in the police com-

pound.“This is getting out of hand,”

Haoth said. “We hope our leaders can stop this.”

A Kikuyu man in Naivasha, wielding a club and roaming the streets Sunday afternoon, called the attacks revenge for the recent deaths of Kikuyus in other parts of the country. “For every one Kikuyu killed, we shall avenge their killing with three,” he told The Associated Press.

Violence since last month’s presidential election has killed nearly 700 people and displaced an additional 250,000.

Both Kibaki and Odinga have urged their supporters to stay peaceful, but their calls seem to have had little effect.

Former U.N. Secretary-Gen-eral Kofi Annan, who is leading mediation talks, said the election dispute has exposed deep-seated ethnic tensions in the East Africa nation.

“Let us not kid ourselves and think that this is an electoral problem,” he said Saturday. “It’s much broader and much deeper.”

Odinga accused the govern-ment of secretly backing the Ki-kuyu gangs to divert attention away from allegations that the election was rigged. Election of-ficials declared Kibaki the victor, and he was sworn in for a second term three days after the vote.

“After stealing the elections from Kenyans, Kibaki now wishes to deny them justice and peace,” Odinga said.

A government spokesman could not be reached for com-ment.


MoNdAy, JANuARy 28, 2008 THE BRoWN dAILy HERALd PAGE 9

sity, but … hockey is really a game of momentum, and every time we got the momentum we just couldn’t fin-ish it off,” Murphy said. “This young team has to know that when they’ve got the pucks bouncing around the crease they’ve got to finish it, be-cause 3-2 is a lot different than 3-1. And when it was 3-1 and they didn’t convert, now you start second-guess-ing yourself.”

The score remained 3-1 until late in the third period, when the Big Red added insult to injury for the Bears. Cornell scored with 2:39 remaining to put the game out of reach, and then tacked on a power-play goal with 1.6 seconds showing on the clock to produce the final score. Stock picked up 37 saves, while Katie Wil-son stonewalled the Bears with 25 saves in her first collegiate start.

The lone positive of the night was that Stock broke Brown’s single-sea-son save record, set by Ali Brewer ’00 in the 1999-2000 season. But even that feat wasn’t enough to make up for the weekend’s results.

“It’s another great personal ac-complishment, being able to be in the Brown record books, but we still need to get victories and that’s ulti-mately what we want,” Stock said. “For me it’s nice, but we’re not get-ting the job done enough.”

Breaking the record so early in the season says a lot more than just how well Stock has been playing.

“It’s kind of a tough record to be proud of,” Murphy said. “I’m proud that she set the record, but at the same time it’s a little bit insulting that other teams are getting that many shots on us.”

Cornell’s physical play did in the Bears, who needed to refocus to take

on Colgate.The Bears did just that against the

Raiders, even after Colgate struck first, when Evan Minnick slipped a shot through Stock’s legs on a power play at 6:13.

But Brown caught one of their luckiest breaks of the season when, 48 seconds into a power play, a Raider was whistled for two penalties on the same play with 2:12 remaining in the first period. Thirty-eight seconds later, Erica Kromm ’11 rifled a shot from the point for her second goal of the year. Sasha Van Muyen ’10 and Jenny Cedorchuk ’10 assisted on the play.

With 39.6 seconds remaining, Brown took the lead when Hayley Moore ’08 beat goalie Lisa Plender-leith with a shot through her legs. Rylee Olewinski ’08 and Kromm picked up assists. But Brown’s at-tempt to score on the third power-play segment was thwarted when Moore was penalized for interfer-ence seven seconds into the second period.

Brown was outshot 19-3 in the sec-ond period and 3-1 on its sole power play of the period, but still managed to hang on to the lead. Kath Surbey ’10 added to the Bears’ lead at 7:51 with her first career goal. Frances Male ’09 recovered a loose puck deep in Brown’s end and found Savannah Smith ’09 on a breakaway with Sur-bey. Smith drew the defender before passing across the crease to Surbey for a one-timer shot.

“That was definitely a highlight reel [play] for Kath Surbey,” Murphy said. “Savannah Smith made the play. She was patient and then she kind of saucered it over. It was nice to see Surbey finish because we’re going to have to get some goal scoring from other people besides Hayley Moore and Rylee Olewinski if we’re going

to win some hockey games.”But Colgate took only 54 seconds

to answer with a goal. The score re-mained 3-2 until 12:28 of the third period, when the Raiders took ad-vantage of a power play to put home a rebound.

“We’re taking too many penal-ties,” Murphy said. “It’s just that we can’t take penalties and think that we’re not going to get scored on. ... But you’re kind of at a loss, because unfortunately it’s your players that are on the ice a lot that are taking the penalties.”

The game ended deadlocked after a five-minute overtime in which Stock made five saves while the Brown of-fense was shut out. The Bears trailed 57-21 in shots and took nine penal-ties to the Raiders’ four, but Stock’s 54 saves, including 20 during power plays, kept the Bears alive.

“When they scored the third one, it was tough knowing that they tied it 3-3, but you’ve got to keep playing,” Stock said. “You can’t let them get the fourth one and lose the game. That’s not what you want. You want to build your team back up and try to go get that goal yourself.”

Brown faces a stiff test this week-end against two of the top teams in the ECAC. On Friday, USCHO.com No. 2 Harvard comes to Meehan for a 4 p.m. game that was moved from Cambridge. Then the Bears travel to face No. 10 Dartmouth. Both teams beat Brown 2-0 earlier in the season, but Stock believes that the Bears have a chance.

“I think our biggest thing will be picking up sticks and challenging players to physically be better than us,” she said. “We know that they’re tough opponents and mentally we have to be ready. We’re the under-dog, but I think we can sneak by one of these teams.”

A Stock of saves, but no win for w. icersAt address, a silent protestBy ROBIN ShULMANWaShington PoSt

NEW YORK — As President Bush gives his State of the Union speech Monday, there will be one man in the audience who plans to sit quietly and watch, his very presence a form of protest.

Joseph Libretti, 51, is sick. He has been diagnosed with chronic lung disease since volunteering af-ter Sept. 11, 2001, to cut through steel to remove bodies from the gritty, smoking pile of detritus of the World Trade Center. Now, too weak to return to his job as an iron-worker, he mostly keeps close to his Pennsylvania home.

He is among a group of respond-ers demanding a coherent national program to provide local medical treatment for Ground Zero work-ers from outside New York City who rushed to the call to help after the terrorist attacks. An existing program was effectively halted in December, when the federal gov-ernment canceled its search for a contractor to process medical reimbursements.

“The president should take care of the workers,” Libretti said during a telephone interview in which he frequently coughed and lost his breath. “If he sees me and other first responders, he’ll know we’re there.”

His protest was helped by Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., who has made medical care for Ground Zero workers her cause.

Right now, Libretti’s son regu-larly drives him two hours to Man-hattan to consult with a pulmonolo-gist and a psychiatrist at Mount Sinai Medical Center, which runs a program providing comprehen-sive treatment to first responders who suffer from some common ail-ments: cough, asthma, headaches, nosebleeds, other respiratory ail-ments and post-traumatic stress disorder.

People came from all 50 states to help in rescue, recovery and cleanup at Ground Zero, and the federal government had been searching for a contractor to run a business center to manage their health care since then. The center

would help clinics across the coun-try treat and monitor first respond-ers, streamline existing payment and pharmaceutical plans, and pay medical bills.

On Dec. 13, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention canceled a request for proposals to establish a business processing center that would help administer clinics across the country to treat those who later became sick.

Without the center, there would be no entity to offer medical refer-rals to responders far from New York City, or any single scheme for the government to reimburse their doctors, or to streamline pharma-ceutical reimbursements.

The center is critical because funding to treat and monitor the health of first responders across the country is about to expire, said James Melius, an occupational health specialist who is the chair-man of the steering committee of the World Trade Center Medical Monitoring and Treatment Pro-gram. The Red Cross is now pro-viding limited funding for treating about 500 first responders outside of the New York City area, but it is to end in coming months, and another contract for monitoring about 2,000 people will run out in June, Melius said. “These people will basically be on their own,” he said.

Bernadette Burden, a spokes-woman for the CDC, said the contractor request was canceled because its language was unclear and confusing.

“We wanted to review the re-quirements,” she said, “to make certain this solicitation was accurate and fair and to make a determina-tion as to whether a new solicitation should be issued in the future.”

Funding was uncertain, and there was little interest in filling the contract, added Holly Babin, a spokeswoman for the Department of Health and Human Services.

But Congress had already ap-propriated $50 million for the pur-pose of treating and monitoring first responders, and approved another $108 million shortly after the contract was called off, said Rep. Maloney.


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Faux-feminists are about the past, not the futureTo the Editor:

Maha Atal ’08 recently wrote about her support for presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, founded largely on what Atal labeled as “individual choice feminism.” (“Matching aprons to pantsuits: dilemmas of the new politician,” Jan. 25) If this is what feminism has become, these two feminists want nothing more to do with it.

Atal based much of her argument on a piece pub-lished in the New York Post (“Bam: Our 1st Woman Prez?” Jan. 7). The Post columnists assert that young to middle-aged women voters who were “widely thought to be Hillary Clinton’s” have increasingly turned to Obama not only because of politics but also because Barack “is like a woman: slim, good looking, with long elegant fingers, appealingly dressed.” Atal agrees with their idea, saying that “Barack’s appeal to young women is his androgyny, his ‘nice guy’ optimism, his slender, lanky frame.”

We have both devoted huge amounts of time to Obama’s campaign — we have made phone calls to voters across the country, we have knocked on doors across New England, and we have tried to spread in-formation across this campus. We do not do it because Obama has a nice body or because his suit fits him well. We do not do it because, as Atal claims, he is a “21st

century jock.” And we certainly do not do it because of his so-called “elegant fingers.”

Feminism, or at least the feminism we believe in, sets men and women on equal footing and then judges them on their individual merits. When we vote for Barack Obama, it won’t be because he is black, and Clinton’s sex is not, in itself, a reason to support her either.

Like Atal, we wish that the media’s attacks on Hil-lary’s outfits, emotions, and overall demeanor would come to an end. Indeed, her campaign has highlighted the sexism still present in our society. Hillary’s struggle should strike a chord not only with American women but also with American men. But claiming that Obama’s success depends upon his physical attributes is taking things a step too far. We shouldn’t side with Clinton because we feel sorry for her.

We are both young women, and we are both femi-nists. But at the end of the day, we will be voting for the candidate we feel can best heal our country’s partisan divide, not the candidate for whom we feel greater sympathy. We will be voting for the best president, not the best the symbol.

Emily Sorg ’10Allie gips ’10

Jan. 27

eDiTorial & leTTersPAGE 10 THE BRoWN dAILy HERALd MoNdAy, JANuARy 28, 2008

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Chris gangStu Woo

You can’t miss the 600,000 pieces of glass that adorn the Sidney Frank Hall for Life Sciences. Glittering on the skywalk that connects one part of the building to the other, the artwork installed on the building when it opened over a year ago seems to emphasize the hall’s size and modernity. “Look at me,” Frank Hall says to us as we walk by. “I’m shiny, I’m big and I’m the most expensive building in the University’s history!”

The $95 million spent on the building shows the sheer might of the Univer-sity’s belief in spending on construction for the sciences. Despite vociferous objections from College Hill residents while the building was still in planning stages years ago and the complications of paying for such an endeavor, the University constructed that building, and opened it for all the world to see, complete with shiny art installation, in October 2006.

Now, the University is in the midst of several more building projects. Brown plans to spend $512 million in the next three years to put up these buildings — that number is equal to 18 percent of the University’s endowment. Brown may not have all the money yet, and the $400 million the University’s already taken out in loans for such projects will only increase, but nevertheless, they’ll do it. But there’s something else the University should consider spending its money on — the students in whose name these buildings rise towards the gray Providence sky. And we quite literally mean “spend money on.”

We’d like to see the University rearrange its priorities to improve the financial aid packages of the roughly 40 percent of the undergraduates we see every day in our classes. Our classmates aren’t something shiny you can show on a tour to prospective students and their families. They can’t help Brown on its quest to strengthen its international presence (it takes a few decades to turn us into big donors). But they deserve the benefit of the intangible — the extra few hours every week to do those problem sets instead of working at a campus eatery, the flexibility their families will receive from a more reasonable cost of education, and most importantly, the freedom to pick any job they want when they graduate — not just the job that will quickly pay back the thousands of dollars worth of loans.

Our words may be falling on blind eyes — after all, the University has shown a penchant for spending. Perhaps Brown expects the same of its students? It shouldn’t. For its size and its endowment, the University can at least remain competitive with our peers — thereby not losing applicants to schools with better deals. Brown must replace loans in packages with grants for all students on financial aid in order to keep our college a place where students learn from the differences between them. And as the University continues to internationalize, making admissions to our foreign-born peers need-blind should be another priority. We know financial aid money doesn’t fall from trees. But we do know Brown has an endowment, that endowments have returns and that the people who run this school have the power to make something happen if they really, truly want it.

During the Jan. 11 Republican presidential debate, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., took some time away from basking in the glow of his post-New Hampshire media-engineered emergence as “frontrunner” to boast, in his folksy, gee-whiz manner, about the troop surge in Iraq that he championed (“I’m telling you, it’s working. … (I) called for the change in strategy”), even going so far as to claim that General David Petraeus, the commander in charge of the surge, should have been Time’s Person of the Year. Indeed, the same media echo chamber that crowned McCain the frontrunner seemed to take almost for granted that the surge was a success. It’s difficult to turn on a TV news show or open a news magazine without seeing some reference to the “success of the surge,” and the op-ed pages of newspapers are filled with conservatives such as Fred Barnes, Mi-chael Gerson and William Kristol labeling Democrats “out of touch with reality” for their “refusal to acknowledge success in Iraq.” (Not to be outdone, McCain and Democratic surge enthusiast Sen. Joseph Lieberman, D-Conn., penned their own pro-surge piece in the Wall Street Journal).

These surge optimists all cite the same facts and statistics to support their conclu-sions: lower rates of sectarian violence and suicide bombings, a safer Baghdad, fewer American casualties and a markedly reduced al-Qaida presence as a result of military gains in the Anbar province. On the surface, these arguments seem persuasive. However, on closer examination, the claims of surge advo-cates are highly misleading. There are compel-ling reasons to believe that the surge is not primarily responsible for the recent reduction in violence, and even regardless of the cause

of these gains, there is little reason to believe that they are in any sense evidence that “we are winning” in Iraq.

The lower violence and casualty rates, at first glance, seem like evidence of real prog-ress, but they ignore the fact that, according to Iraq Body Count (a non-partisan group whose methodology is widely accepted across the ideological spectrum), 2007 saw the high-est number of Iraqi civilian dead since 2003, despite the 37 percent decrease in deaths in Baghdad, implying that violence actually in-

creased dramatically across the country. The largest of these increases occurred in Nineva, where civilian deaths rose by 143 percent.

To be fair, the vast majority of this violence occurred in the first eight months of the year, which means that the surge (announced in January of 2007) may simply have taken some time to have an effect. This explanation is certainly possible, but there are at least three surge-independent alternative explanations that combine to provide a better explanation than the surge itself. First, previously mixed Shi’a and Sunni neighborhoods in Baghdad

became ethnically homogenous. This new separation inside the city between Shi’a and Sunni eliminated a major source of sectarian tension, and hence conflict. Second, the deci-sion by certain Sunni groups to fight al-Qaida in Anbar and other provinces that were major sources of Iraqi and coalition casualties, which predated even the announcement of the surge by four months (giving the lie to the claim that the surge was responsible for the Sunnis turn-ing on al-Qaida), was clearly a significant factor in the reduction in violence. Finally, civilian

backlash against violence in the holy city of Najaf led Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army, one of the major sources of violent activity, to cease all military operations for six months start-ing Aug. 29, a time period that directly cor-responds with decreasing levels of violence. Each of these events contributes significantly to the lower levels of violence across Iraq and, when looked at in conjunction, renders the surge superfluous to any explanation of lower casualty levels in Iraq.

Even if, despite all of the plausible alterna-tive explanations, one still believes that the

surge is the primary cause of recent reduc-tions in violence, it still does not prove that the coalition is in any way “winning” in Iraq. Iraqis have not come much, if at all, closer to agreements on the political questions that all agree are essential to any long-term suc-cess in Iraq, like the division of oil revenue, distribution of power between Sunnis, Shi’as and Kurds, economic rebuilding, and the final, permanent shape of the Iraqi government. The only thing resembling a political success, a law designed to allow former Baath party members to participate in the government again, is so poorly written that a recent New York Times editorial described it as “so riddled with loopholes” that it could be a “a sure-fire way to fuel political tensions rather than calm them” (“In Search of Answers,” Jan. 15).

The same thing could be said about the surge itself, which some analysts, including a former U.S. Army general, claim could actually end up resulting in worse violence than would have otherwise occurred. The departure of the surge troops unaccompanied by real political progress may leave a power vacuum in which multiple factions compete for control, a struggle made especially deadly by the military regrouping and weapons ac-quisition made possible by a period of relative calm. The only way to stop this eventuality is to get the various groups to cooperate rather than compete, and the only way to do that is a political settlement. Given that no such politi-cal progress has been made, who, in William Kristol’s words, is “out of touch with reality”? Is it those who recognize the Iraq debacle for what it is, or those who, like President John-son’s National Security Advisor in 1967, see “light at the end of the tunnel” — or in more accurate terms, are too proud and stubborn to admit that maybe, just maybe, the Iraq War they so vigorously supported might not be going so well after all?

Zack Beauchamp ’10 pretty clearly isn’t a surge enthusiast.

The Student Union of Brown University held its first meeting on May 3, 2007. After seeing a few students on the Main Green promoting it a few days beforehand, and having noth-ing better to do that evening during finals period, I went. The concept truly fascinated me: students working together in a directly democratic process to help change the Uni-versity, uniting to address issues critical to student life at Brown.

It seemed that the initial meeting was rather successful. The Herald reported that 84 students attended the meeting (“Students of the U. Unite,” Sept. 17), and it lasted for about two hours. Attendees learned that the General Assembly was the only decision-making body for the union and that it would be up to the entire assembly to propose and set the agenda for the union.

Yet for a group with a large membership and an extremely successful initial meeting, they were surprisingly silent last semester. I don’t know of any events they held besides one or two General Assemblies, nor of any issues they “championed.” The Herald last reported on the union on Sept. 17. And while Herald coverage is not the only indicator of a successful student group, the failed SUBU experiment implies that students have little desire to take action on the critical issues facing their education and their University.

The Undergraduate Council of Students also fails to inform or mobilize students about critical University policy. Every now and then, they hold office hours at the Sharpe Refec-

tory. They occasionally encourage students to come to meetings. But by and large students don’t care about, don’t know about or disap-prove of what the UCS is doing. When polled by the Herald in early November less than 40 percent of students said they “somewhat or strongly approved” of UCS (“Students Favor Obama, Herald Poll Finds,” Nov. 13). Historically low voter turnout and the desper-

ate wave of e-mails that appear each semester due to committee vacancies also attest to students’ apathetic attitude toward UCS.

On the whole, the lackluster record of representative student organizations illus-trates an alarming trend: At best, students are unaware of the various means through which

they can be agents of change at Brown. At worst, they are disaffected and disinterested in University policy and the decision-making processes that affect their education and life on campus

Of course there are exceptions to the trend, such as the emPOWER group which successfully lobbied the University (and UCS) to take notice of its energy use and

its carbon footprint and to take some steps in the right direction. Yet far too often we are apathetic, unorganized and disinterested.

The Student Activities Office aggravates the situation with its uneven application of ever-changing policies. Just ask any of the student organizers for presidential candidates

about the bureaucratic hurdles they had to jump through this fall to be recognized and permitted to organize on campus. Most of the time all they wanted to do was hold meetings in school buildings or walk into the Ratty with some table slips (something that private businesses like Fish Co. do on a regular basis). And can anybody tell me why the SAO requires that every student group have a constitution? Frankly, if the Bulgarian Club or the Young Communist League would like to form without one, it’s lunacy to bar them from doing so.

Ironically, students are most apathetic toward the areas of University policy that affect them most directly, such as financial aid and student activities. What else could explain the disinterest in UCS and the lack of participation in a viable alternative, such as SUBU? When was the last time we pro-tested outside a Corporation meeting over our spiraling tuition? Students around the world have a strong tradition of organizing and uniting over key issues such as tuition increases. Israeli students, for example, went on strike last spring — something that con-temporary American students have trouble comprehending.

We should remember that nearly 40 years ago, Brown students had the audacity to think that they could effect a fundamental change in the Brown curriculum. If we choose, we can also be agents of change at Brown and across the country. But if we don’t drop the complacency and the apathy, we certainly never will.

Max Chaiken ‘09 is a proud member of the young Bulgarian Communist Alliance.

By MAX CHAIKENoPinionS ColuMniSt

The surge myth

The sorry state of student activism at Brown

At best, students are unaware of the various means through which they can be agents of change at Brown. At worst,

they are disaffected and disinterested in university policy and the decision-

making processes that affect their education and life on campus.

There are compelling reasons to

believe that the surge is not primarily

responsible for the recent reduction

in violence, and even regardless of the

cause of these gains, there is little reason

to believe that they are in any sense

evidence that “we are winning” in Iraq.

ZACK BEAuCHAMPoPinionS ColuMniSt

opinionsMoNdAy, JANuARy 28, 2008 THE BRoWN dAILy HERALd PAGE 11

sporTs monDayPAGE 12 THE BRoWN dAILy HERALd MoNdAy, JANuARy 28, 2008

Tempers flare as m. hoops beats YaleBears even league record at 1-1; MacDonald ‘08 hurtBy STU WOOSenior editor

After racing off to a 16-point first-half lead against Yale Saturday after-noon, the men’s basketball team got

sluggish. The Bears made turnovers, the Bulldogs made

three-pointers and Yale suddenly had a lead midway through the second half.Then, Chris Skrelja ’09 got into a shoving match with Bulldogs guard Porter Braswell. Just as suddenly, the Bears and their boisterous home crowd had a rallying point.

The Bears then pulled away for a 77-68 win against Yale, which beat Brown in New Haven, Conn., in the teams’ Ivy League opener on Jan. 19.

Skrelja, the team’s emotional lead-er on Saturday, also led his team on the court with a double-double of 16 points and 15 rebounds. Guard Da-mon Huffman ’08 added a team-high 23 points, while Yale guard Eric Flato countered with a game-high 24. Ashley Hess / Herald File Photo

Swingman Chris Skrelja ‘09 led with Bears with a double-double on Saturday, scoring 16 points and grabbi ng 15 rebounds. He also got into a shoving match with yale guard Porter Braswell.

Ashley Hess / HeraldMatt Gevlinger ‘09 won two of three decisions this weekend against drexel, Army and Lehigh.

Gymnastics finishes ‘pretty’ third at Pizzitola meetBy KATIE WOOdContriButing Writer

The electric atmosphere from the men’s basketball victory on Satur-day carried into Sunday afternoon with the gymnastics team as Brown made a strong showing with a close third place finish. Brown (185.825) finished just behind Bowling Green (191.475) and Bridgeport (188.675. The team notched wins over Mas-sachusetts Institute of Technology (180.600), whom they beat in the season opener, as well as West Ches-ter (174.225). Coaches and players alike were happy with their first home performance of the year, and the overall morale of the team was high after the narrow defeat.

“We did better; better is good,” said Assistant Coach Richard Har-ris. “We need to not miss. We’re pretty out there. But we need to be pretty and not miss. If we put the two together, we’re set on a higher stage,” Harris added, referring to Ivy League competition.

The floor proved to be the girls’ dominant event for the day as they narrowly finished behind Bowl-ing Green State, 47.800-48.000. Four Bears — Stephanie Albert ’10, Chelsey Binkley ’11, Whitney Diederich’09 and Jen Sobuta’09 — finished in the top 10 in the floor exercise, the most of any school.

Sobuta had a great afternoon, fin-ishing third overall in the all-around with a personal best of 38.025 points. She received the highest score of any competitor at 9.800 on the beam, also a personal best, and finished tied-for-fifth in the floor exercise at 9.600 with teammate Diederich and right behind Binkley in fourth at 9.650.

“We were disappointed we didn’t beat Bridgeport. But we have a lot of potential to improve. We need to increase our team score every meet — we have a long way to go,” Sobuta said.

As for the performance of the freshmen, both coaches and up-perclassmen were impressed.

“We have a strong freshman class this year. They stepped it up. We’re lucky to have them,” said Ali-cia Sacramone’10, a former team-mate. Sacramone is training with the U.S. Olympic squad in prepara-tion for competition in Beijing in the upcoming summer. She said she’ll try to make it back for every home meet to help support her former team.

The freshmen performed very well in the meet, in front of a sup-por tive home crowd. Victoria Zanelli ’11 was the second-highest scoring freshman in the all-around at 37.250, finishing fifth overall be-hind Sobuta. Binkley was the third highest-scoring freshman, making an impressive show as well.

“It was nerve-wracking for me. But the spirit of the team and crowd behind me helped,” said Melissa Bowe ’11.

Harris, the assistant coach, said the meet was a fun opener, since the energy from the crowd fueled the

Despite a Stock of saves, w. icers can’t win over weekendGoalie breaks saves record, but hockey loses and tiesBy ANdREW BRACAaSSiStant SPortS editor

The women’s hockey team re-bounded from a 5-1 loss to Cornell on Friday by pulling out a 3-3 tie

against Col-gate Univer-sity on Satur-day, despite being badly outshot and committing five more

penalties than the Raiders. Op-portunistic offense and 54 saves by Nicole Stock ’09 kept the Bears in a game that could have been a blowout, but the team couldn’t pick up a win over their Eastern College Athletic Conference opponent. The weekend’s action at Meehan Audi-torium dropped Brown’s record to 3-14-4 (2-9-3 ECAC).

Head Coach Digit Murphy called the Cornell game “probably our worst performance all semester.” It went downhill quickly. After the Bears failed to convert on an early 5-on-3 advantage, the Big Red took the lead 9:10 into the game on a power play when Brittany Forgues tipped a shot coming from the point through Stock’s legs.

Cornell needed only 48 seconds after the second period commenced to get Brown on the ropes. Caeleigh Beerworth doubled the lead with a blast from the left side 29 seconds in. Nineteen seconds later, the Big Red lit the scoring lamp again, and the Bears never fully recovered.

“The first one was an unbeliev-able snipe,” Murphy said. “Maybe Stock could have come out a little bit, but it was a great shot. … (On) the second goal (of the period), we didn’t pick up our assignments. When you don’t pick up your as-signments, you get scored on. They out-muscled us at the front of the net.”

But the Bears did get one goal back that period. Cornell was whistled for a penalty at 6:02 and another 11 seconds later, giving Brown another long 5-on-3 advan-tage that resulted in Nicole Brown ’10 scoring her third goal of the sea-son. Samantha Stortini ’11 started the play with a long pass up the right side to Erin Connors ’10, who sent a pass across the crease that Brown tipped in.

But the Bears could draw no closer. They had no more power play opportunities and were out-shot 18-7 in the third period.

“I thought we had a lot of inten-

Wrestlers win, then lose in first home dualsWrestling finishes with a 1-2 record in three home duals over the weekendBy hAN CUISPortS Staff Writer

The wrestling team hosted its first dual match against Drexel last Fri-day afternoon in the Pizzitola Cen-ter, where the Bears claimed the victory in the deciding final match 22-15. The next day, Brown com-peted against two more teams in its territory — Army in the morn-ing and Lehigh in the evening. It turned out to be a disappointing day for the Bears as they lost both duals 9-25. But the strong finish by the Bears in the final three matches against Lehigh earned back respect for the team, putting a stop to its zero-point performance. Branden Stearns ’09 was the hero

of the match when he pinned his opponent in 45 seconds — the only fall of the day.

After losing the first match on Friday, in the 174-pound weight class, the wrestlers were able to capitalize during the close match-es, and they got right back on the leading side. But Drexel was no easy opponent either. The Drag-ons trailed closely behind by four points going into the final match when they still had hope of revers-ing Brown’s lead. But the Bears finally put an end to their effort when Chris Musser ’09 took down his opponent, Billy Haydt, in the final 30 seconds of the match and grabbed the win for the team.

“Against Drexel we wrestled very well, “ said Assistant Coach John Clark. “It was a nice way to start the weekend.”

With one win under its belt,

Bruno headed into Saturday craving more. But they stumbled against Army, its first opponent of the day. Although Army took the first win at 125 pounds, tri-captain Jeff Schell ’08 wrestled back a win for the team in the 133-pound weight class. Unfor-tunately, the Bears could not pull out the close matches like they did on Friday. At 157 pounds, Tom Fazio ’09 won by decision 3-0 to keep the team in the match, but the Bears lost the following four matches and lost any hope of a comeback victory. Though Army had already clinched the victory in the dual, Zach Zdrada ’09 won one more match for the team with a 3-2 decision in the final match at 285 pounds.

The Bears tried to shake off

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Monday, January 28, 2008