USG senators face impeachment

By: Jeff Engelhardt

Ten months after Project Eco-Dawgs introduced the “green” fee, the Undergraduate Student Government unanimously voted to support it.

Both the senators and Eco-Dawg members were excited and relieved that everyone could come together in support of a fee that gained tremendous student-support in a referendum back in April.

But for two senators, the feeling of relief did not last long as they had to face the threat of losing their positions.

Senators John Boddie and Brandon Allen faced impeachment after the senate accused them of missing multiple meetings and not filing constituent reports.

Boddie defended himself in front of the senate, stating he had been actively meeting with his constituents, but failed to document an official report. He also pointed out he had only missed one meeting and his duties as president for Black Affairs Council sometimes requires him to arrive late or leave USG meetings early.

When asked if he would be willing to take his duties more seriously, Boddie mentioned his work as a senator from previous semesters shows his passion for the senate.

The senate voted to keep Boddie in USG after a secret-ballot vote.

Allen was not as fortunate as Boddie.

Allen, who had missed more than two meetings, left Wednesday’s meeting before he could defend himself against impeachment. The senators said that proved he did not care about the organization and voted him off the senate with a unanimous decision.

The finance committee will also have a new look starting in the spring semester.

Finance committee chair Krystin McDermott and committee member Pricilliano Fabian will leave the group because of executive positions they are taking outside of USG.

Constitutional guidelines require senators who hold executive positions in other groups to leave the finance committee so there is no favoritism.

Senator Ashley Epps, the current vice chair for the committee, will take over as chair in the spring.

USG debates College of Education resolution

By: Jeff Engelhardt

For the first time this semester, the Undergraduate Student Government proposed constituent-based resolutions. While almost all of the resolutions passed with little debate, a set of resolutions aimed to help students in the College of Education and Human Services had to be tabled. 

Dana Agusto, a senator representing the College of Education and Human Services, proposed the university offer the Illinois Basic Skills Test, a mandatory test for all students wanting to get into the teacher education program, on campus.

Currently, students must go to John A. Logan Community College to take the test and Agusto said that has been problematic for students who do not have any means of transportation. 

She also said the university should offer transportation to John A. Logan for as long as the test is offered there. 

The senate brought up concerns about cost and how much students would actually use the services. Ashley White, a senator involved in the College of Education and Human Services, said it is a much needed service since the test is offered at 7 a.m. on Saturdays when transportation options are limited. 

Agusto also proposed that the mandatory classroom observation for students in 200-level education courses, should also provide transportation. She said many times students have to go to Murphysboro, Pickneyville, Benton and Marion and struggle to find ways to get there. 

Again senators worried about cost and use of the services, but Agusto said she is involved in the College of Education and Human Services and her constituents know better than anyone how important these services would be.

“These are concerns from my constituents so they are not going to benefit every student on campus,” Agusto said. “If I were in College of Business, then it would benefit them, but this is very needed for students wanting to be teachers.”

McManus: Election coverage not as bad as critics say

By: Barton Lorimor

The former Los Angeles Times Washington D.C. bureau chief said Monday the Internet has become a permanent refrigerator door for people to post things on.

Doyle McManus answered questions from an audience gathered in the SIUC Student Center Ballroom at a luncheon sponsored by the Paul Simon Public Policy Institute. Though McManus said he expected the crowd to be more harsh on the career-long journalist and his colleagues reporting the news from Washington, most of the people that approached microphones Monday were full of questions.

McManus, now a columnist for the Times, said the media’s coverage of the 2008 presidential election is not what it should have been, but was not as shoddy as critics have illustrated.

“The usual critique for us is that we just covered the heck out of the horse race when we don’t give people enough meat and potatoes on the issues,” he said. “Look inside yourselves here. When you were watching that campaign, wasn’t it the horse race you were really fascinated by?”

That horse race included a seasoned Republican Senator, John McCain, challenge Barack Obama — the first non-white candidate of a major political party.

McManus told staff members of the Daily Egyptian later Monday afternoon that the joke around his office was that LA Times reporters were tempted to go to the Supreme Court and ask them to extend the election by a couple more months because it was a thrill ride to cover.

He said the publications coverage of the election began 21 months before Nov. 4 as candidates for the primary elections began gearing up their campaigns. In March, the Times wrote a series of “meat and potatoes” stories about the issues and what people were looking for in the next president. Yet by the time of the Democratic National Convention, McManus said his office was flooded with calls about when his paper was going to do such a story.

“Several newspapers took the work they had done on the issues … and put them in one permanent place on their web site,” he said. The LA Times was no exception, McManus said, which turned the Internet into a “permanent refrigerator” since the reporters kept posting things on the site for people to see.

William Babcock, a journalism professor of Media Ethics, asked McManus if the newspaper media, with their tighter budgets, were still focusing on ethics. In response, McManus said it does not cost the newspaper any money to follow a code of ethics, but the price tag has gone up to have correspondents in other countries.

The average costs of a one-person bureau overseas has a price tag of nearly $500,000, which is five times the cost of keeping a reporter at city hall, he said. McManus said that is why there are two American journalists currently stationed in Afghanistan even though the nation’s eye has focused on that middle eastern country and its militar efforts there.

“That concerns me more than ethics,” he said.

Vietnam vet shares experiences

By: Sean McGahan

James Scales said he learned in Vietnam what it took the average citizen in the United States at least 10 more years to learn.

Scales, who was drafted at 18 but didn’t arrive in Vietnam until he was 22, said his time at war was the first time race didn’t matter among so many U.S. soldiers.

“We were doing then what would take America at least another 10 years to realize — that people could be people, regardless of color and all that good stuff.”

He said this notion led to many promises that were never kept. Soldiers would tell each other that they would always keep in touch and show up at each other’s weddings, but when they got back they realized their families would never accept their brothers of war.

Acceptance was tough to come by across the board for soldiers returning from Vietnam, Scales said. He and others were lucky because they did not go straight home after Vietnam but rather spent time in Germany.

Because of this, they were diverted from the negative attention by many people against the war in the United States and could tell them they were simply returning from Germany.

Scales was 27 when he returned for the first time, but developmentally felt much older.

“I had seen horror. I had seen the reality of what mankind can do to each other,” he said. “I knew what it was like to receive mercy and what it was like to grant mercy. I’d seen people at their lowest state in terms of poverty. I’d seen people who would think the ghetto was a castle.”

For a period of time, he did not know whether he should come back.

The future was uncertain for a young black man at that time, he said. For a man with very little information but a lot of battle savvy, a future away from the military looking vague and hopeless, he said.

He was burnt out and did not know what he wanted to do with his life, which he said was ironic for someone who is now director of career services at SIUC.

He went up in the ranks from private to colonel in that time and embraced the life the Army had to offer. The military was just like many other jobs, he said.

“I found it really wasn’t different than anything else in big business, higher ed, you name it,” he said. “Everybody has a boss that you have to report to and everybody you report to has a job for you to do and you’re going to say, ‘Yes sir,’ ‘No sir’ and get the job done.”

Although he said he did not seek out the adventure, it came to him on his way to three Purple Hearts and five combat tours in various nations from Vietnam to Iraq.

He said he wasn’t concerned with getting killed, but definitely did not want to be disabled.

“Life itself was an adventure to me and all these other things were ancillary,” he said. “Hell, you can get killed crossing the street.”

REACH gives tips for grant awards

By: Demarcus Hamilton

REACH is a program designed for students to create and administer research projects sponsored by the school along with a paid assistantship.

Students were given tips on Tuesday on how to submit their application.

Some tips included student samples.

Statement of project objectives: Clearly and concisely state the research concept you will be addressing.

Not good: My goal is to write a book.

Best:The goal of this project is to write a book about the corruption of political power in an ideal community, using animals working collectively on a farm as an analog for human behavior.

Background and Context: Explain the present state of knowledge in the field with proper citations of pertinent literature.

Not good: The movie on the Discovery Channel said that no one knows what society occupied the area after the Maya civilization collapsed.

Best: Although it has long been believed that the Maya “heartland” of northern Guatemala was depopulated after the Classic Maya collapse (Culbert 1977; Thompson 1960), recent archaeological research (Chase 1985; Smith and Smith 1990) has revealed substantial settlement in the Peten lakes area dating from the eleventh through seventeenth centuries.

Methods/Procedures/Materials: Describe your general plan of work.

Not good: I will work in my sponsor’s laboratory

Best: Because I am looking for the gene (s) in poison ivy that determine (s) the plant’s toxicity to humans, I will be using my sponsor’s gene-sequencer in my project. I will spend the first two weeks of my project collecting samples from Jackson County, then the next two weeks preparing samples for analysis using the XYZ method…

Statement of Significance and Impact: Explain how your project contributes to learning.

Not good: Nobody has done it yet

Best: Although color symbolism in The Great Gatsby has been investigated by many scholars (e.g., Smith 1950, Jones 1955, Snerdwell 1960), no one has previously used a computer-based textual analysis of such imagery to explore the socioeconomic contexts of…

Role of the Faculty Sponsor: Explain how you will interact with the faculty sponsor.

Not good: My sponsor will help me throughout this creative project.

Best: My sponsor guided my initial literature and source search by providing a list of books and technical articles to read. My sponsors own expertise with this medium and subject area will then guide my initial conceptual explorations. This will result in my experimenting with materials and technique in order to develop a range of preliminary outcomes that my sponsor will critique and provide feedback for further exploration and refinement. The final 3D development will require the integration of elements of my preliminary studies, but will use advanced studio techniques. My sponsor will provide both technical and aesthetic guidance during development of the final piece, but I will create and execute all content.

The whimsical world of technology

By: Sean McGahan

Three words of advice: Befriend an engineer.

The best and brightest of this group are working quickly to get you a cell phone that you can weave into you shirt, attach a headset to and call your friends as quick as you can say “Billy.”

No clumsy button pressing. No dropping an expensive piece of equipment in a toilet bowl.

This notion and more were talked about at the SIUIS conference during the weekend at the Engineering Building.

This student-run conference helps educate aspiring engineers (and aspiring understanders of engineers like myself) look into the future and see how different kinds of technologies are advancing.

For someone without the base scientific and technical knowledge of an engineering student, the jargon and statistics can be intimidating.

A chip that is able to test itself sounds like a good thing, but the mechanics of such a phenomenon are beyond me. I’m still trying to figure out the physics of why toilets in Australia flush in the opposite direction as the ones I use.

Despite my confusion, the overall theme of these advancements stands out — if you’re not the one making this new technology, you’d better at least be aware of it.

Otherwise, we’ll all be left eating the dust of robots that are performing our jobs.

Find your niche and make sure your human attributes are not something that can easily be replicated by a machine.

They’re working on cameras that have similar features to a human eye.

So watch out.

My Take Back the Night Experience

By Shaneika Booker
This event was really touching. I was really surprised to see women sharing  her violent experiences with everyone. While I was there, I had the opportunity to speak with a woman who was going to adopt her niece.  Her niece’s father had killed her mother three months earlier.

That was a more-than-sufficient wake up call, to see a 7-year-old girl up front interacting with the speakers and listening to their every word. This was an overall great event that I would love to attend year after year.

Dining Hall assistants share etiquette tips

Posted by Barton Lorimor

Alyssa Rider opened Wednesday nights etiquette dinner by proclaiming that proper etiquette is a broad subject.

That’s a tough point to argue, especially for this part of southern Illinois, where students from around the world come to study. Rider, a graduate assistant in nutrition to the dining halls, shared some etiquette tips to the 40 people that had gathered in a Lentz Hall dining room for a five-course meal and presentation about how to prevent offending a potential employer at a meal.

Listed below are some of the tips Rider shared with the group.

• It seems like a never ending debate on whether or not one is allowed to pick up a soup bowl and drink its contents. It turns out that it is possible to drink soup broth so long as the dinnerware is right. If the soup was served in a cup, drink away. However, it is considered uncool to drink soup served in a bowl. (Also, though the rules are different in Japan, slurping soup while eating does not fly in the U.S.)
• Though it may be normal to use only one fork and spoon in the dining halls, fine dinner parties layout multiples of each utensil. What seems like a nightmare at first is actually not so terrifying. Rider says the way to handle that situation is to use the utensil on the end first, change switch it out to the next one in line as the the next course is served. In some cases, a fork is positioned horizontally and at the top of a plate. That bad boy is reserved for dessert.
• If one were to excuse themselves from the table but are not finished with the course that has been served, turning a fork upside down on the right hand side of a plate is the universal signal to a waiter the person is not done eating from this plate.
• To avoid a potential disaster such as sauce on the face, or splatter on clothing, avoid foods that have the potential to be messy such as barbecue ribs or spaghetti.
• The proper way to eat soup is dipping the spoon into the bowl/cup and pushing it away from the torso. Most people have naturally just brought the spoon closer towards them, however Rider said going the opposite direction can prevent the soup from finding its way onto a nice blouse or tie.
• Most people our age enjoy a good slouch in that old sofa Mom tried to throw out years ago, and for health reasons probably should have. But slouching at the dining table is not the way to go. That does not mean sit straight as a board, but at least sit-up.
• Finally, if you are eating out, it is the unwritten law that the person who invited you to dinner pick up the check. However, if it is a comprehensive meeting, Rider says asking about splitting the tab should be done at the time of the invitation.

Freshmen five unfolds

By: Christian Holt

Every now and again I remember why I wanted to write: I love telling stories.

Sometimes there are stories that I don’t care about, the ones written just because it seems like something that should be covered or the ones used to fill space and pick up someone else’s slack. But, sometimes we come across story ideas that actually inspire us, excite us.

That is how I felt when my editor pitched the freshmen five idea to me at the beginning of the semester.

I knew it would kind of hard to find the old ones, but I also know the new ones would make it totally worth the hassle.

Let me, please, introduce to you the new freshmen five (in words I could not use in a news story).

Brittany Murphy (not the celebrity) is from Danville studying electrical engineering, is an exceptionally cool young woman.

That’s not even considering she is taking one of the craziest class loads I’ve ever heard of (like, 18 hours of honors courses).

Murphy also happens to be hearing impaired. I was kind of curious to know if she thought this changed her experiences at school but she insists it does not.

She said it has just become part of her day.

Murphy likes to play volleyball and hang out with her friends when she is not studying for one of her many courses.

Sagnik Dey, from Kuwait studying mechanical engineering, is one of the most outgoing individuals I’ve ever met.

He did tense up a little when the photographer, Julia, tried taking pictures of him on his bike,

Dey said he loves to play soccer with his new friends in his spare time.

I personally don’t know that much about Kuwait, I can’t wait to learn.

Sam Oas, from Villa Park studying aviation, also a cool kid.

He said he came to SIUC because his dad had come here … and he knew the program rocked.

Oas said he wants to be a part of the Aviation Ambassadors, the group of students who recruit high school students to SIUC.

Jessica Tureaud, from Chicago studying journalism, is probably the most outgoing of the group.

She said she likes to go out and have fun with her friends.

Tureaud said she’s learned early (thank goodness) that there has to be a balance between school and fun … not that school’s not fun.

Rob Jesselson, from Glenview studying radio television, said he’s excited about how much there is to do in Carbondale … even though his home town has more people in it.

I think Jesselson will bring a lot to the freshmen five table.

He’s kind of quiet when you first meet him, but then opens up and is quite funny.

Jesselson is a pledge for the fraternity Delta Chi and said he spends a lot of time hanging out with his new brothers.

In case you couldn’t tell, I think all of these kids are awesome. I really hope everyone who reads the stories gets as interested in their lives as I already am.

Welcome back Tri Sigma?

By: Christian Holt

Katlin Chumbley joined Sigma Sigma Sigma in January. She was kicked out in May.

Chumbley, a sophomore from Peoria studying early childhood education, said she became a member of the sorority in the middle of it falling apart.

She said she couldn’t imagine why the national headquarters was trying to reestablish on SIUC’s campus so soon after falling apart.

She said she wished they had worked with the members to find ways to stay on campus last May.

While the members from before will not be allowed to rush again in the spring when the Carbondale chapter restarts, old members are still considered in good standing and are alumni of the group, said Tiffany Newman, graduate assistant in charge of the Panhellenic sororities.

Chumbley said she doesn’t think this was the best way to handle members, especially ones like her who had “nothing to do with it falling apart.”

“I think it’s unfair to us new members because we didn’t chapter was like before,” she said.

She said her idea was, each of the old members be interviewed and then representatives from nationals decide who should be allowed to be part of the sorority again.