friday, february 23, 2007

Volume CXLII, No. 21 Since 1866, Daily Since 1891FRIDAY, FEBR UAR Y 23, 2007FRIDAY, FEBR UAR Y 23, 2007

THE BROWN DAILY HERALD

News tips: [email protected] Angell Street, Providence, Rhode Islandwww.browndailyherald.com

Students fl out rules and keep pets in dorms

Alligators and tarantulas in dorms? Despite the exotic nature of these animals, they are among the pets some students keep in residence halls. Students who keep these “il-legal” pets violate University reg-ulations and risk severe punish-ments — all in order to give love

and attention to a critter of their own.

Students may only keep pets that can live in a tank smaller than 10 gallons, according to the Resi-

dential Life Web site. Richard Bova, senior associate dean for Residen-tial Life, said the University catch-

es between fi ve and 10 students each year keeping pets that do not meet the requirement.

“Sometimes we discover them through health inspections, and some students come to us because it creates problems with their liv-ing environment,” Bova said.

According to Bova, students

BY BRIANNA BARZOLASTAFF WRITER

New policies enacted due to prefrosh drinking

The Offi ce of Admission — re-sponding to an incident last se-mester in which four prospective students required emergency medical attention for excessive alcohol consumption during an overnight visit to campus — has introduced new policies for fi rst-years who host prospective stu-dents.

The changes, which include formal training sessions for over-night hosts, were fi nalized over winter break and implemented the last week.

“(The incidents were) a wake-

up call for us to take a look at these programs,” said Dean of Admission James Miller ’73. “We’ve added more structure to the program in terms of training the hosts.”

In October four prospective students staying in Keeney Quad-rangle were treated for exces-sive alcohol consumption. After the incident, University adminis-trators and members of the Bru-in Club, which coordinates the overnight visit program, started thinking about ways to prevent similar events in the future.

“The changes were looked at in an ongoing discussion within the executive board of the Bruin

Club and with the admissions of-fi ce and higher administration,” said Oliver Staehelin ’08, over-night hosting coordinator for the Bruin Club.

Previously, fi rst-years re-ceived no formal training and little instruction on hosting pro-spective students. Now, unit representatives are required to discuss policies governing the overnight visit program, includ-ing standards of student conduct and the University’s drug and al-cohol policies.

Hosts also receive a list of emergency contacts, which had

BY NICOLE DUNGCASTAFF WRITER

Fish Co effect muted at Jo’s

JOSIAH’S — Wednesday is College Night at the Fish Company Bar & Grill, and Josiah’s tends to get busy after midnight as revelers stream back. Early Thursday morning, however, Jo’s was still quiet enough for Andrea Perez ’10 to sit alone at a six-person table and quietly fi gure out her engineering homework.

She said she rarely works in Jo’s at night, but she had been there for two hours already without being bothered by any noisy distractions.

With University offi cials sug-gesting that they might close Jo’s and the Gate — the two late-night eateries on campus — earlier than their current 2 a.m. closing time in an effort to curb rowdy, late-night behavior, students and food service workers are unsure of the future of late-night dining. Administrators said Wednesday, Friday and Satur-day nights are especially problem-atic, making those late-night shifts diffi cult to staff.

The scene at Jo’s on Wednesday night and early Thursday morning this week appeared to belie those claims. At midnight, there were about 30 people eating or relaxing at the tables in Jo’s dining room, and no students were visibly intoxi-cated. It was subdued enough that the television on the far wall play-ing college basketball highlights on

ESPN was audible halfway across the room.

“I like working here, it’s pretty low key,” said Alex Eichler ’08, who said he had been a Jo’s employee for about three weeks. “It might just be that on Wednesday nights, everybody is watching ‘Lost’ or at Fish Co.”

“But I wouldn’t want to work here on Saturday,” he said.

Retail Dining Supervisor Sean Debobes, who said he had worked at Brown for three years, includ-ing six months at Jo’s, agreed that the eatery was usually calm. “I’ve seen a number of things, defi nitely some of the college cross-section,” he said.

Debobes said it has become eas-ier recently to staff late-night shifts, but the slots on Wednesday, Friday and Saturday nights are still the last to fi ll up.

University offi cials have said that the late-night behavioral prob-lems are not limited to Jo’s — work-ers at the Gate have complained about disorderly students as well.

Debobes said he disagreed with any comparison between the two eateries. “It’s a very different crowd (at Jo’s) than at the Gate. It’s a different world,” he said. “It’s the same students and the same com-munity, but the atmosphere is so different.”

BY NICK WERLECONTRIBUTING WRITER

Many students oppose legacy preference in College admission

Most Brown undergraduates op-pose giving preference to the children of alums in the admis-sion process, according to a re-cent Herald poll.

A solid majority of respon-dents — 57 percent — said they oppose giving preference to leg-acy applicants, while 23 percent said they favor the practice. An-other 21 percent said they had no opinion or did not answer. The poll was conducted from Jan. 29 to Feb. 2 and has a margin of er-ror of 4.7 percent with 95 percent confi dence. The total adds up to more than 100 percent due to rounding.

“The rule of thumb is that, all things being equal, we will tilt in the favor of the student whose parents have gone to Brown,” said Dean of Admission James Miller ’73.

“Brown has a long tradition as

an institution with a great sense of history and community. I think it’s important for us, when possi-ble, to continue that sense of tra-dition, community and commit-ment to families. It is part of the ethos and culture of Brown, as it is at a number of places,” Miller

said.Miller cited alumni involve-

ment as a major justifi cation for giving preference to legacy appli-cants. “We, and all other private universities, rely heavily on the efforts of our alumni to sustain ourselves. We rely on our gradu-ates to staff committees, donate money, recruit students and do a whole variety of things that (alum-ni of) public institutions don’t do. In turn, I think it’s important for us to continue to have continuity with families,” he said.

Miller said the University’s “fi nancial aid programs are, rel-atively speaking, almost com-pletely funded by graduates of the institution. Prior generations are funding the aspirations of the next generation, and that’s some-thing that really doesn’t happen to any great degree at state insti-

BY JAMES SHAPIROSENIOR STAFF WRITER

continued on page 3

continued on page 4

Tai Ho Shin / HeraldTai Ho Shin / HeraldT The University fi nds fi ve to 10 students a year who keep pets illegally in dormitories. Students have admitted to keeping pets as diverse as tarantulas and alligators.

continued on page 4

Med school, budget top Corporation weekend agenda

The Corporation will forgo its usual meeting structure this weekend to spend extra time dis-cussing a strategic vision for the Alpert Medical School. The Uni-versity’s top governing body will also approve a larger annual bud-get and tuition, elect new offi cers and hear President Ruth Sim-mons’ offi cial response to last year’s report on Brown’s connec-tions to the slave trade.

Rather than hold normal com-

mittee meetings, the Corporation will meet retreat-style today at the Westin hotel downtown, said Michael Chapman, vice presi-dent for public affairs and Uni-versity relations. That gathering will focus mainly on the future of the Med School as well as budget and capital issues, he said.

The Med School is at a pivotal point in its development after a $100 million gift by entrepreneur Warren Alpert last month and the purchase last year of prop-erty in the Jewelry District, like-ly allowing the construction of a

separate campus for the school. Today’s strategic discussion will likely focus on how to best imple-ment and budget the growth, as well as how to allocate Alpert’s gift, which was relatively unre-stricted.

The special retreat format gives members the opportunity to “talk about a number of stra-tegic issues that don’t regularly get discussed in committee meet-ings,” Chapman said. “It’s an op-portunity for the whole Corpo-

BY ROSS FRAZIERNEWS EDITOR

UNDERGROUND RISING?The Underground is facing an uncertain future due to aging equipment and low funding but is going through a mild revival this spring

HPV VACCINEOne of the creators of the HPV vaccine Gardasil, Barry Buckland, was on campus Thursday to discuss the cre-ation of the drug

SPORTS EXTRA!The women’s tennis team swept its matches last week-end to even its record, and the men’s and women’s track teams are gearing for Heps

3ARTS & CULTURE

5CAMPUS NEWS

9SPORTS

INSIDE:

POINT/COUNTERPOINTBen Bernstein ’09 and Finn Yarbrough ’09 debate wheth-er Banner is going to be ben-efi cial or a bust for Brown

11OPINIONS

THE HERALD POLLFirst in a three-part series on

admission policies

Student Opinion on Legacy Admission

oppose preference to legacy admission

favor preference to legacy admission

23%

21%57%

don’t know/no answer

FEATURE

continued on page 8 continued on page 4


Editorial Phone: 401.351.3372Business Phone: 401.351.3260

Eric Beck, President

Mary-Catherine Lader, Vice President

Ally Ouh, Treasurer

Mandeep Gill, Secretary

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

University community since 1891. It is published Monday through Friday during the aca-

demic year, excluding vacations, once during Commencement, once during Orientation and

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ACROSS1 North Carolina

county borderingTennessee andVirginia

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Field Museum,e.g.

14 Atlas rocketstage

16 Magazine filler17 Emulates Ogden

Nash?19 Evidence of

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Cardiff touristshop?

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investments32 “She’s a Lady”

songwriter34 Arizona-based

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out38 Jazz session for

a sibling combo?41 Kinski of

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53 Joule part54 Ahab’s kingdom:

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commerceagreement

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60 Tonys andObies?

64 “__ only known...”

65 Support for aninth-inning rally?

68 St. Patrick’s land69 Brilliance70 Bender71 Column-lined

walkway72 Cause to be

counted out

73 Block

DOWN1 NCR product2 Indian title3 Harry at home4 Audience

member in a film,probably

5 Become clear to,with “on”

6 “__ Rhythm”7 Vice follower8 Slashed

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or its seat10 Follow11 Coulombs per

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__”22 No.-cruncher23 Vietnam

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28 Lille buddy29 Impart31 “It’s you __”33 Shade of blue35 Term.36 Town near Turin

39 Strunk and Whitesubject

40 Confederategeneral Stuart

41 Stuffed deliappetizers

42 Carvingfigureheads, forinstance

43 Place to hear alot of talk

46 “I don’t think so”47 Full house letters48 Kind of trip taken

alone

50 Tree withpalmate leaves

52 Ho Chi __56 CD segment57 Edison

contemporary59 Means, e.g.61 Greek pianist

Bachauer62 Not split?63 Prefix with

morph66 In addition67 Big name in auto

additives

By Richard Chisholm(c)2007 Tribune Media Services, Inc. 2/23/07

2/23/07

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THE BROWN DAILY HERALD FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 23, 2007PAGE 2

WBF| Matt Vascellaro

How to Get Down | Nate Saunders

Deo | Daniel Perez

Deep Fried Kittens | Cara FitzGibbon

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Chocolate Covered Cotton | Mark Brinker

SHARPE REFECTORY

LUNCH — Chicken Parmesan Grinder, Vegetarian Spinach and Mushroom Soup, Saturday Night Jambalaya, Broccoli au Gratin, Butter Cookies, Cheesecake Brownies

DINNER — Red Potato Frittata, Fresh Vegetable Melange, Okra and Tomato, New England Clam Chowder, Fried Catfi sh with Tartar Sauce, Strawberry Dessert Pizza, Banana Cake

VERNEY-WOOLLEY DINING HALL

LUNCH — Vegetarian Mushroom Vegetable Soup, Rhode Island Quahog Chowder, Chicken Fingers, Pasta y Fagioli, Corn Cobbets, Cheesecake Brownies

DINNER — Breaded Pollock Filet, Grilled Chicken, Creamy Cappelini with Broccoli, Crinkle Cut French Fries, Sugar Snap Peas, Oriental Stir Fry, Italian Bread, Banana Cake

CAMPUS NEWSTHE BROWN DAILY HERALDFRIDAY, FEBRUARY 23, 2007 PAGE 3

Underground attempts revival while facing uncertain future

Filled to capacity for the fi rst two weekends of this semester, the Un-derground is experiencing some-thing of a revival.

“The fi rst night this semester was absolutely huge,” said Charles Harding ’09, referring to the Feb. 2 show featuring two student bands — The Media and The Trolleys. Harding has worked at the venue for two years and currently serves as its booking agent. Two weekends later, the Underground featured The Low Anthem, which includes Dan Lefkowitz and Brown graduates Ben Miller ’06 and Jeff Prystowsky ’06.

The Underground was consis-tently crowded in 2002, according to Prystowsky. However, a year and a half of periodic shutdowns by the University due to unsupervised drunkenness and a number of fi ghts changed the Underground, Harding said.

“After the crackdown it was a dif-ferent Underground. People weren’t talking about going,” Prystowsky said, reminiscing about his time at Brown.

Both Prystowsky and Miller agree the space has potential, but they are frustrated with its non-functioning equipment — though the Underground has operated as a business since 1981, the lighting and sound systems date from the 1970s.

“The facilities here used to be re-ally good when we were freshmen and now it’s horrible. There’s real-ly nowhere on campus for bands to perform that’s half decent,” Miller said.

“(We) had a show a couple weeks ago and the entire sound system blew out during the second song,” said Jenna White ’09, who works at the Underground and plays electric violin for the student band Saturday Morning Project. “(It is) really frus-trating and disappointing as an art-ist,” she said.

Tim Drinan ’08, a member of The Trolleys — a four-member band that has played at the Underground pe-riodically for about a year — shared similar concerns about the lighting and sound systems. Drinan said while he likes the ambiance of the space, he fi nds it to have poor acoustics.

Drinan said it is important to have a space on campus where students can hear live music if they don’t have

cars or don’t want to walk down the Hill. The Underground also gives students an opportunity to perform, he said.

White agreed that the Under-ground is an important venue for music on campus because scarce practice space and limited opportu-nities to perform deter Brown mu-sicians. “I think it is important that students have a place to play on cam-pus (that is) run by students,” White said.

She noted that opportunities to play on campus beyond the Under-ground generally include frater-nity parties and very small venues in lounges. White said she hopes the planned renovations of Faunce House will bring a few updates and improvements to the space such as a new sound system and lights.

Though Harding is in favor of im-provements, he worries the Univer-sity is looking to use the space cur-rently occupied by the Underground for different purposes. If this were to occur, it would be diffi cult to recre-ate the Underground given new leg-islation intensifying the standards for alcohol distribution.

Though the Underground is a business, it requires subsidies from the University to stay open. Har-ding said it is hard for the space to make a real profi t given the low price of its alcoholic beverages. He said he hopes the Undergraduate Finance Board will give the Under-ground funds to clean up the space and get new equipment — a change that could also benefi t the Hourglass Cafe, which shares space with the Underground.

Currently, the Underground has taken steps to revitalize its presence on campus. Harding is trying to book off-campus bands and Brown bands on the same night in order to attract a diverse crowd and introduce new music on campus.

Harding said the Underground will only be open for 12-14 nights this semester. It will try to open up for a few more weekends despite budget restraints.

The Underground will be open Friday and Saturday nights until at least mid-March, with bands booked for nearly all of those nights — in-for nearly all of those nights — in-for nearly acluding a variety of events thrown by students groups, such as Students for Sensible Drug Policy and Relay for Life.

“I’m really hoping that the Un-derground is fi nally back,” Harding said.

BY ROBIN STEELESTAFF WRITER

Chris Bennett / HeraldThe Underground, in the basement of Faunce House, will be open 12-14 days this semester.

Anti-war vigil outside Kennedy’s offi ce endsA three-day protest vigil outside the Pawtucket offi ce of Rep. Pat-rick Kennedy, D-R.I., ended yesterday with the protestors — in-cluding several Brown students — continuing their call for Ken-nedy to vote against President Bush’s request for more funding for the war in Iraq.

For three evenings, Tuesday through Thursday, about a dozen members of Military Families Speak Out and R.I. Declaration of Peace held signs encouraging passers-by to call Kennedy and ex-press their opposition to the war. A small group also entered his offi ce each night to speak with his staff and hold a vigil that in-cluded poems and testimonials by U.S. troops and a recitation of the names of soldiers from Rhode Island killed in Iraq.

The groups held a smaller vigil Thursday at the Warwick offi ce of Rep. Jim Langevin, D-R.I., and spoke with members of his staff.

“They promised that they would get us a meeting with Con-gressman Langevin before the vote comes up,” Jacque Amoureux GS, one of the protest’s organizers, told The Herald. She took part in the vigil at Langevin’s offi ce on Thursday.

Amoureux said she was encouraged that Langevin’s staff ap-peared to listen to what the protestors had to say, but she ex-pressed concern about how he might vote.

“If you oppose the war and you think that sending more troops is not the answer — which (Kennedy and Langevin) have both stated — then why continue to fund the war? The case is very simple: we want them to match their actions with their words,” Amoureux said.

Members of Brown anti-war group Operation Iraqi Freedom took part in the three-day demonstration at Kennedy’s offi ce. In-grid O’Brien ’07, who attended the protests at Kennedy’s offi ce Tuesday and Thursday, said she thought Thursday’s protest went well despite the rain.

“We got a lot of really supportive honks from cars passing by, so I’m hoping that at least some people also called the represen-tative so that he knows that this is important not just to us but to other people,” she said.

President Bush has requested an additional $93.4 billion for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan this fi scal year.

—Alex Roehrkasse

N E W S I N B R I E F

not previously been given to hosts. Unit representatives must confi rm in writing that hosts went through the short training session.

“I hope that they will give prospective hosts a sense of security because they under-stand what their roles are. I think we’re giving them as much help as they can,” Miller said.

Other changes are also be-ing made to the overnight host-ing program. Now, prospective students will have to meet with admission offi ce representa-tives before they meet their hosts.

The number of prospective students staying overnight on campus will be considerably lower. In past semesters, as many as 60 high school stu-dents have stayed overnight in Brown residence halls during peak weeks, but new rules al-low a maximum of only 24 pro-spective students to stay over-night each week, Miller said.

“We thought we’d start out with this number and observe how the changes are working,” Staehelin said.

Unit 15 was the fi rst to host a prospective student under the new rule. Michele Zerah ’10, the unit representative who had to host the training session, told The Herald she thinks the new rules probably won’t affect the program dras-tically. Most students already know what they should or shouldn’t do when it comes to

overnight guests, she said.“The students already know

they’re not supposed to give the prefrosh alcohol or con-done underage drinking. The sessions don’t make it harder for the reps or the hosts, but it’s just more technical,” Zerah said.

But she said the changes could harm the host program — with a training session to attend, students may opt out of being a host. Even a short training session could deter different students, Zerah said.

The new changes may also extend to similar programs. Al-though A Day on College Hill — an annual event that brings admitted students to campus in the spring — is run sepa-rately from the overnight host-ing program, similar measures may be taken in terms of train-ing sessions, said Adam Kroll ’09, this year’s ADOCH co-co-ordinator.

“The administrators are taking measures to ensure that ADOCH runs as smoothly as it has in past years, so we may use the training sessions as a way to make everyone take their jobs as hosts a little more seriously,” Kroll said.

Currently, though, the training sessions are only re-quired for the overnight host-ing program. Coordinators of ADOCH and Third World Welcome — two of the largest events on campus that involve hosting high school students — are not yet sure what, if any, changes will be made to the programs, Miller said.

continued from page 1

New policies implemented after prefrosh drinking incident

www.browndailyherald.com

ARTS & CULTURE


tutions.”Though Miller did not have

demographic data on legacy ap-plicants, he said he expected that “they’re probably from a higher socioeconomic background, but that’s not necessarily true. They probably come from more profes-sional families.”

Miller said the Offi ce of Ad-mission has not recently consid-ered revoking preferences for legacy applicants.

Students interviewed by The Herald were mostly opposed or indifferent to preferential treat-ment for legacy applicants.

“I’m the fi rst in my family to graduate from high school, so in my case I don’t think it’s fair,” said Priscilla Gamino ’08.

Many students said they ex-pected legacy students would be overrepresented because of their own merit. “I can understand that the admit rate will be higher, be-cause children of alumni tend to have the kind of background that would help them get into Brown. But I think that a preference hin-ders the meritocracy that should

be more in place,” said Kurt Mor-iber ’09.

Moriber and others said the University’s motivation for em-ploying legacy preference seems simple. “One word — money. It’s all about alumni donations. I think there’s nothing more to say about that,” Moriber said.

“I see the merit as far as the ex-pected donations and dedication to the University, but it seems like another way to marginalize low-income or fi rst-generation appli-cants,” said Steve Hazeltine ’09.

But Tor Tarantola ’08, presi-dent of the Brown Democrats, said he did not expect that elim-inating legacy preference would harm the University fi nancially “because what you’re doing is broadening your donor base. In-stead of having just one set of par-ents whose kids went to Brown, you’ll have another set of parents. Parents don’t donate $10,000 per kid who gets in. They give based on what they can, and what they’re willing to give.”

One legacy student, Nicholas Kay ’09, said many people tend to exaggerate the advantage that legacies receive. “I think that peo-

ple see legacy students as getting a much bigger boost than they ac-tually do. It helps, but it’s not go-ing to get you in alone,” Kay said. “I can’t think of any legacy stu-dents who just slipped in some-how. Brown defi nitely is not an easy school to get into. You have to have the credentials before they even consider legacy.”

Some students said the prac-tice did not concern them. “I think it’s fi ne. It didn’t affect the way I thought about what schools I wanted to go to. That’s just how the college admissions process works these days,” said Richard Stein ’10.

Other students said legacy preference is something of a nec-essary evil. “If the alumni have given the University donations, it’s understandable, even though it doesn’t really seem fair, strictly speaking,” said Joe Larios ’10.

“I think I would have been a strong applicant whether or not my parents had been alumni, but they were, and I’m fairly certain it gave me an advantage,” said Ben Foley ’07. “I haven’t met any leg-acy students that I thought stood out as being unqualifi ed.”


who are found housing pets in dorms are given fair warning and are asked to move the animal out-side of the dorm room into more suitable living conditions.

“We ask that students remove the pets immediately and entrust the animal with a responsible owner. If they do not heed to our warning, then students will face judicial proceedings and fi nes,” Bova said. The fi ne amount de-pends on the type of animal, he added.

Though Bova said the Univer-sity’s rules are clearly stated on the Web site, it doesn’t seem to stop students from acquiring pets — and outrageous ones at that. Hans Sprecher ’08, who is cur-rently studying abroad in Barba-dos, kept a rose-haired tarantula named Cleo in his New Pembroke named Cleo in his New Pembroke named Cleo in his Newroom last year.

“With heaps of vodka and rum scattered around the room, swords hanging on the walls, clothes dry-ing from the water pipes and Christmas lights tangled around the fi re equipment, keeping a pet seemed quite tame,” Sprecher wrote in an e-mail to The Herald. “Having a tarantula is very cool — kind of like having a mouse — just a feisty, scary-looking mouse.”

Sprecher and other students took turns caring for the spider and keeping it safe from discov-ery during room inspections. “A room check once came around when Cleo was out. Luckily, I had a friend over who was sitting on the bed fl ipping around a bottle

of vodka, and this provided ample distraction,” Sprecher said.

Having one pet isn’t enough of a risk for some students. Two roommates, who declined to give their names or residence hall for fear of disciplinary repercussions, keep a cat and an American al-ligator. The roommates bought the alligator from the Rhode Is-land Aquarium and Pet Center on North Main Street.

“It was pretty expensive. The alligator cost us $100, and then we had to buy food and supplies for it,” one of the students said. “My roommate wanted to get some-thing really cool, so when we saw the alligator, we knew we had to buy it.”

The alligator, which they named Ali G, is currently 14 inch-es long and is kept in a tank they estimate is greater than 10 gallons in volume.

But Mew, a black cat one of the students found a few months ago near his workplace in East Provi-dence, roams freely about the dorm room.

“Maintenance guys have come in and said we weren’t supposed to have the animals, but that didn’t stop us. We take really good care of our pets, and they’re very hap-py,” the student said.

Although the alligator will eventually reach a length of 10 to 16 feet, it will only grow about six inches during the fi rst year, ac-cording to the roommates. They said a pet store employee told them they could donate the alliga-tor to a local zoo once it grew to an unmanageable size.

“We would really like to keep the alligator after this year, but we’ll probably need a bigger tank,” the student said.

Though neither Sprecher nor the anonymous roommates were ever caught with their animals, some students haven’t been so lucky. Recently, The Herald re-ported that ResLife cited on-cam-pus fraternity Phi Kappa Psi for a pet snake in their lounge.

“The snake is no longer in the fraternity, and the situation has been dealt with,” Bova said of the incident.

Bova specifi ed that, though animals are strictly forbidden for companionship purposes, they are allowed in dorms for special needs.

“Under certain conditions ser-vice animals are allowed, and we then make appropriate housing accommodations for the person and the animal,” Bova said. “How-ever, we do not have any students under this circumstance at the moment.”

According to Bova, ResLife’s concerns stem from some stu-dents’ irresponsibility as pet own-ers.

“We have found so many ani-mals that have been left to fend for themselves while students go on breaks, and that is not accept-able,” Bova said. “As long as peo-ple cooperate with our standards, we give students the opportunity to correct themselves at fi rst. I ask students respectfully to not bring their pets to school. I am a dog-lover, and I don’t bring my dog to work.”

Carlos Reyes, who said he was hired as a retail dining supervisor only a week and a half ago, said he had heard that there could be a few drunken people, especially on Wednesdays, but he said he “hasn’t seen any big disturbances.” When asked about the University offi -cials’ claims of excessive theft, he said the supervisors “try to create a consciousness among students. That’s why I’m here. To me, its em-barrassing to have to go tell some-one to pay for some stuff.”

By 1:15 a.m., the scene at Jo’s had changed little from earlier in the night. Perez packed her bag as a few groups of seemingly intoxi-cated students — dressed for club-bing — walked in. There were a few shouting matches across the room, and twice a man challenged some-one else to fi ght, but no fi ghts ma-terialized.

“Yo, blue fl eece, you’re (exple-tive) dead,” one man shouted as he stumbled out of the building.

But despite the occasional com-motion, Eichler said most students are polite. “I feel like most people at Brown have worked some crap-py food service job at some point, so they’re pretty understanding,” he said.

Jo’s had three supervisors and

an offi cer from the Department of Public Safety on hand on Wednes-day.

“I’m sure stuff happens from time to time but I’ve never experi-enced it, although it’s been a while since I’ve worked here,” said Cam-pus Police Offi cer James Massey who was on duty Wednesday night. “I haven’t heard of anything bad happening in the last semester and a half or so.”

At 1:30 a.m., the noise peaked as more people — some obviously in-toxicated — wandered in. But aside from some shouting matches and a few dropped Odwalla bars, there was little unruliness. Two other DPS offi cers arrived and stood talk-ing with Massey near the quesadil-la station.

Fifteen minutes later, most of the crowd had started trickling out. An hour earlier, there was a 20-person line waiting to pay for food, but by 1:45 a.m. the two student cashiers sat reading.

There were still about 30 peo-ple hanging around Jo’s as the staff started cleaning up a few minutes before closing. Many of the tables were covered in trash and there were several spills of food on the fl oor. At 2 a.m., Jo’s staff turned off the lights in the dining room and the crowd started fi ling out into the dark.

continued from page 1continued from page 1

Fish Co effect muted at Jo’s Wednesday

www.browndai-lyherald.com

Many students oppose legacy admission

Students fl out rules and keep pets in dorms


CAMPUS NEWSTHE BROWN DAILY HERALDFRIDAY, FEBRUARY 23, 2007 PAGE 5

N E W S I N B R I E F

Researchers at the Alpert Medi-cal School have identifi ed a new factor in cell growth that could aid scientists seeking to cure can-cer and other diseases caused by cellular malfunction.

It’s too early to know how the fi ndings will translate to biomedi-cal applications, but the discovery sheds light on how cells multiply.

“These fi ndings may provide fresh approaches to (treating) a variety of disorders,” said Alan Rosmarin MA’98, associate pro-fessor of medicine and the study’s leader.

Working with Zhongfa Yang MS’04 PhD ’05, a research fellow at Rhode Island Hospital and in-structor at the Med School, Ros-marin and his team discovered that a transcription factor known as GABP — previously not con-sidered crucial to cell growth — in fact plays a major role in cell division.

Biologists at Rosmarin’s Rhode Island Hospital lab shut off GABP production in cells that were repro-ducing normally. What the scien-tists observed was startling — as soon as the cells became GABP-de-fi cient, they stopped dividing.

“We showed that if we take away GABP, cell growth comes to a screeching halt,” Rosmarin ex-plained.

By a series of tests, the re-searchers concluded that GABP not only contributes to cell growth but also single-handedly initiates cellular reproduction.

Rosmarin’s team — which in-cluded Rhode Island Hospital re-search associate Stephanie Mott — worked on the project for six years. They published their fi nd-ings earlier this month in the sci-entifi c journal Nature Cell Biol-ogy.

Yang, who coordinated the ex-periments and was the lead au-thor of the journal article, said previous understandings of cel-lular reproduction left some ques-tions unanswered.

“This alternative pathway (for cell growth) will explain the con-tradictions in the previous theo-ry,” he said.

Whether the discovery will open the door to practical medical treatments depends on how pre-cisely scientists are able to ma-nipulate the GABP level in human cells. The challenge for research-ers is to fi nd a method of reduc-ing GABP without eliminating it entirely.

Currently, by RNA-silenc-ing, scientists can lower levels of GABP by turning off its coding gene, but the process is impre-cise — scientists cannot control exactly how much GABP produc-tion is diminished. Lowering lev-els of GABP could keep cancer from spreading, but completely shutting off production would kill healthy cells as well as cancerous ones.

“You have to fi ne-tune this pro-tein expression,” Yang explained.

The key to combating other diseases may involve the oppo-site approach: boosting levels of GABP. Rosmarin, who is the direc-tor of clinical oncology research for the Rhode Island healthcare provider Lifespan, said the pro-tein could also have applications for stem cell biology. Stimulating production of GABP may also al-low scientists to re-grow muscle tissue, which can help treat dis-eases such as muscular dystro-phy.

“I don’t want to suggest that these treatments are around the corner, because they are not,” Rosmarin said. “But that doesn’t mean that, if we can fi nd ways to manipulate the system, we couldn’t come up with some-thing.”

Med School research breakthrough could aid cancer fi ghtBY ABE LUBETKINSTAFF WRITER

One of the creators of Gardasil, pharmaceutical giant Merck’s widely discussed vaccine for the human papillomavirus — a sexu-ally transmitted disease that is a major cause of cervical cancer — spoke Thursday in Salomon 001 on the scientifi c process of creat-ing the vaccine and making it safe and practical for widespread use.

The lecture by Barry Buck-land, vice president for biopro-cess research and development at Merck, was sponsored by Stu-dents for Choice, Colleges against Cancer and the Global Alliance to Immunize against AIDS.

Buckland said Gardasil pro-tects against high-risk HPV types 16 and 18, which together cause 70 percent of cervical cancer, and low-risk types 6 and 11, which cause 90 percent of genital warts.

Buckland was introduced by Allison Pappas ’08, president of Students for Choice, and Annie DeGroot, adjunct associate pro-fessor of community health, who is director of the TB/HIV Re-search Laboratory and founder of GAIA.

Though the talk was adver-tised as covering both the creation of the vaccine and its possible ef-fects on society, Buckland spoke only on the scientifi c process of developing the vaccine.

Buckland explained that the researchers took the L1 protein — a major capsid protein of HPV — from each of the four types of the virus the vaccine protects against and cloned them in yeast to create a non-infectious vaccine. Buckland said his group chose this method because they had pre-viously used a similar process on a vaccine for hepatitis B.

He explained that unlike other vaccines — such as those for polio or measles, mumps and rubella —

the HPV vaccine did not use the complete virus. As a result, the vaccine provides protection with-out introducing the virus itself, he said.

Buckland said the HPV vaccine had been approved by the feder-al Food and Drug Administration relatively quickly — approval had only taken about six months.

After the lecture Buckland told The Herald he had been excited to work on the HPV vaccine. “A project like this everybody wants to work on — I mean, it’s a dream project, but you don’t really know that in the beginning, because in the beginning you don’t really know whether it’s going to work or not,” he said.

His group worked on the vac-cine for eight years, he said, and only about half of the vaccines they work on actually prove suc-cessful. “It’s just been a great proj-ect. I’ve been really proud to have been a part of it,” he said.

Pappas said Students for Choice had begun preparations to

bring Buckland to campus last fall and “lucked out” with the recent publicity of the vaccine. “We got in contact with Buckland in Novem-ber, and then all of a sudden, this exploded on the news,” she said.

Buckland gave the lecture without compensation, Pappas said. “He agrees that the vaccine is so important that spreading the word about it is the most impor-tant thing, so he wanted to come talk about it,” she said.

The lecture was especially im-portant because of the health im-plications of the vaccine, said Emi-ly Lau ’09, co-president of Brown’s chapter of Colleges Against Can-cer. “Cervical cancer really is one of the leading killers of women,” she said.

“It obviously was very science-focused, but I think it’s important for people to be informed about the vaccine itself so they can then go and make their own opinions about its place in society and whether or not they want to have it,” Pappas said.

Buckland speaks on developing HPV vaccineBY ANNA MILLMANCONTRIBUTING WRITER

Eunice Hong / HeraldMerck exec Barry Buckland discussed the company’s HPV vaccine Thursday night.

EC 11 enrollment reaches record numbersThis academic year 867 students have taken or are currently taking EC 11: “Principles of Economics” — the most who have ever taken it in one year.

This semester, the course has 507 students — the course’s highest enrollment ever — making it the second-largest course this semes-ter after PS 22: “City Politics,” which has 556 students, according to University Registrar Michael Pesta.

Econ 11 has been among the University’s most popular courses for several years, but this year’s enrollment numbers are signifi cantly higher than last year, when 733 students took the course.

Professor of Economics Andrew Foster, who chairs the depart-ment, said he thinks the high numbers are partly due to students liking the lectures. Foster credits the course’s instructors this year, Se-nior Lecturer in Economics Rachel Friedberg and Professor of Eco-nomics Roberto Serrano, with Econ 11’s popularity.

Friedberg and Serrano said they are pleased with the increasing number of students taking Econ 11. They added that the department might have to hire more teaching assistants in the future, since some sections are already as large as 30 students this semester.

There are concerns that if the class grows even larger in future se-mesters, it could exceed the size of Brown’s largest auditorium. If the class size in a semester exceeds 600 students, lectures would have to be split into two sections, Pesta said.

“The increasing enrollment … refl ects an increasing interest in economics in study,” Foster said.

Still, the increase in the number of students taking Econ 11 may not necessarily refl ect growth in the economics program. Most stu-dents in the course are fi rst-years and sophomores who have not yet declared a concentration, Pesta said. The course is a requirement for the concentrations in economics, international relations and Com-merce, Organizations, and Entrepreneurship, and Serrano said the course material has broad appeal.

“I took the course to have a general understanding of economics,” said Jake Phillips ’10.

Alex Tudela ’10 said he considered “Econ 11 to be one of the stan-dard classes I should take in college.”

— Mehmet Sokeli

Chris Bennett / Herald

867 students enrolled in Econ 11 this year, with 507 students in the spring semester.


and in Harlem at the Stadium Rac-quet Club. I’d take the subway by myself, from ninth through 11th grade. I thought I was a big girl.

Where did you play your se-nior year?

I went to Florida to play ten-nis my senior year at Saddlebrook Tennis Academy. I wanted to get better at tennis, and the move al-lowed me to play a lot more. We had class from 7 a.m. to noon and then tennis from 1 p.m. to fi ve, sometimes six. I loved it.

How did it feel to leave New York your senior year for a new school?

I was getting frustrated in New York City because I wasn’t getting to play enough. The de-mands of my strict school made it diffi cult to leave and play in tour-naments. In order to get better, I knew it was necessary for me to change my surroundings. The change was much more favorable for an athletic lifestyle.

How did you decide on Brown?

Three of my four brothers went to Brown … and played foot-ball here. I used to come to all of their games, so I already had an appreciation for its campus cul-ture. When I was being recruited, Brown defi nitely stuck out as a place I felt most comfortable.

What is the best part of playing tennis for Brown?

Playing for (Head Coach) Paul Wardlaw has probably been one of the best things that happened to me at Brown. He’s really had a lot of patience with the development of my game. He has helped me come to understand myself and

the type of player I want to be.

What is the relationship be-tween the men’s and women’s tennis teams?

I go to all of their matches when our schedule allows. Their energy is such an inspiration to me. They compete with so much fi ght and heart. I admire how much the men love playing tennis. You can see that they want to be on the court.

What you are doing after grad-uation?

I want to play professional ten-nis as soon as I graduate. There are a group of tournaments in France in July and then Spain in August. Europe is a great environ-ment to begin playing profession-ally because there are so many tournaments there in the summer. Plus, playing on the clay court is the way to go. It makes you focus on point building as opposed to hard court where the ball is a lot faster.

What is your mindset about becoming a professional?

College has provided me with an amazing opportunity to im-prove, especially under Paul Ward-law. I know if I devote even more time then I will defi nitely improve even more, and that is all I can ask of myself. Now, I just have to fi nd a personal coach.

Do you think you could live in Europe?

Absolutely. I have plans some way or another to live in Italy. The accessibility of all of the art and architecture is what I want to sur-round myself with. I eventually want to go to graduate school in architecture and then study in Ita-ly. I just have to learn how to draw and paint fi rst.

Ames ’07 of w. tennis aiming for strong fi nal campaign


ing at will in a blowout I could just play NBA 2K7 with my suitemates. (Side note: I am the best 2K7 player in the entire world. I’m not kidding. I am better than the 30-year-old nerd who sits naked in his mom’s basement and has no life. If you think you can beat me, send me an e-mail and bring it on.) I would like to give a shout-out to my main man, who? David Lee, baby. Lee went 15-for-15 from the fl oor en route to winning the game’s MVP.

Skills CompetitionYou know it’s a bad competition

when it’s taboo to actually try. This reminded me of middle school when I’d play basketball with girls just to fl irt with them and any guy who exerted any effort beating the girls would get made fun of. Can’t Kobe at least pretend he cares about winning the $35,000 prize?

Three-Point ShootoutWhere are Ray Allen, Luther

Head, Kyle Korver and Kevin Mar-tin? Oh right, they’re making room for Damon Jones.

Dunk ContestMichael Jordan has turned into

a grumpy, jealous old man. He and

the rest of the judges completely stiffed Dwight Howard on the most ridiculous dunk of the night when he placed a sticker 12 feet 6 inch-es high on the backboard before throwing one down. Tyrus “Pay Me” Thomas may as well have not come and Nate “Wanna Fight?” Robinson fi nally got his comeup-pance by getting screwed by the judges. At least Gerald Green put on a show. Still, the dunk contest (along with the And 1 Mix Tape) is everything that’s wrong with Amer-ican basketball — all style and no substance. I can’t wait for the coun-try to realize we aren’t the best any-more at team basketball.

The All-Star GameBefore the game, TNT analyst

Doug Collins warned us that the game would start off slowly be-cause everyone wants to be so un-selfi sh. Someone must have for-gotten to tell that to the East team. They came out shooting contest-ed threes (Arenas was 2-of-7) and hoisting up long fade-away jump-ers, which made the game barely watchable. Shaq looks like he’s not far away from being an average starting center, and I’m not sure how Caron Butler fi nished 1-of-7 in a game with no one playing de-fense. Shawn Marion was praised

the entire game for cherry picking (“he just always seems to be the fastest down the court”), while Tim Duncan further cemented his sta-tus as the least exciting superstar to watch.

It wasn’t entirely bad, though. Amare Stoudemire and Dwight Howard are redefi ning the center position. Stoudemire, the Knicks’ seventh overall draft pick in the — wait, I forgot they traded their pick for Antonio McDyess. Any-way, Stoudemire was running the fl oor, dishing the rock, driving for reverse layups, swishing jumpers and dunking over everyone, and Dwight Howard looks like the big-gest athletic freak I’ve ever seen in the NBA. Also, Tony Parker gave the rest of the world the chance to stare at Eva Longoria during those cutaways to her in the crowd. And that’s before I get to seven-foot-er Chris Bosh, who moves like a wingman but has sick nasty post moves and range out to the three-point line.

Until next time, sports world. Until next time, sports world. UntilYou keep doing your thing and I’ll continue to point out your fl aws and shortcomings. Love, Tom.

Tom Trudeau ’09 is serious about the 2K7 challenge.

Trudeau ’09: NBA All-Star Weekend notescontinued from page 12


of how much McAndrew contin-ues to pack the stat sheet. It won’t matter if he averages 25 points and 10 boards for the remainder of the season. It won’t matter if he

makes First-Team All Ivy or even wins league Player of the Year honors. McAndrew has reached the point where it simply isn’t enough to put up impressive stats — it also matters how he does it.

But just for a second, imagine

how scary it will be for Brown’s Ivy foes when there’s nothing left to criticize.

Chris Mahr ’07 would be ecstatic with shooting 6-for-9 from the

fl oor in one of his IM games.

McAndrew humbly hits his stridecontinued from page 12

WORLD & NATIONTHE BROWN DAILY HERALDFRIDAY, FEBRUARY 23, 2007 PAGE 7

W O R L D I N B R I E F

Iraqi police offi cial says offi cer, soldiers admit to rape

BAGHDAD, Iraq (Washington Post) — An Iraqi police offi cial in the northeastern city of Tal Afar said Thursday that a military offi cer and three soldiers had admitted to raping a Sunni woman and recording the act with a cell phone camera.

The soldiers’ admission follows another Sunni woman’s assertion this week that she had been raped in Baghdad by members of Iraq’s predominately Shiite security forces. Iraq’s Kurdish president and its Sunni vice president said Thursday that a judge should investigate her case, which the Shiite-led government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has dismissed as groundless.

Iraqi President Jalal Talabani said in a statement that the courts were “the only legitimate place to examine such allegations” and that the government should avoid steps that would “infl ame sensi-tivities and create mistrust.”

Talabani’s stance, echoed by vice president Tarik al-Hashimi, is sharply at odds with al-Maliki’s insistence that the 20-year-old Bagh-dad woman who contends three Iraqi policemen raped her Sunday is a criminal who fabricated the story to exacerbate sectarian tension and undermine a U.S. and Iraqi security plan to pacify the capital.

The case has caused a political uproar — with Sunnis demanding justice and Shiites defending the offi cers — in a society where public discussion of rape is rare.

Weepy judge awards custody of Smith remains to guardian(Los Angeles Times) — A teary Florida judge Thursday ordered that the body of Anna Nicole Smith be turned over to the lawyer repre-senting her fi ve-month-old daughter and indicated that he hoped the reality television star would be buried in the Bahamas with her dead son.

Broward County, Fla., Circuit Judge Larry Seidlin awarded custody of Smith’s body to Richard Millstein, appointed to represent Dann-ielynn. Millstein was ordered to meet with the parties and work out details for burying Smith.

Seidlin indicated that he believed that Smith wanted to be buried next to her 20-year-old son, Daniel, who died Sept. 10 of an apparent drug overdose.

“I want her buried with her son in the Bahamas,” Seidlin said. “I want them to be together.”

The ruling comes a day earlier than expected, but in the second week of hearings of how to deal with the body of Smith, who died Feb. 8.

Chimps observed making weapons

(Washington Post) — Chimpanzees living in the West African savan-nah have been observed fashioning deadly spears from sticks and using the hand-crafted tools to hunt small mammals—the fi rst rou-tine production of deadly weapons ever observed in animals other than humans.

The multi-step spear-making practice, documented by research-ers in Senegal who spent years gaining the chimpanzees’ trust, adds credence to the idea that human forebears fashioned similar tools millions of years ago.

The landmark observation also supports the long-debated prop-osition that females — the main makers and users of spears among the Senegalese chimps — tend to be the innovators and creative problem solvers in primate culture.

Using their hands and teeth, the chimpanzees were repeatedly seen tearing the side branches off long straight sticks, peeling back the bark and sharpening one end, the researchers report in Thurs-day’s on-line issue of the journal Current Biology. Then, grasping the weapon in a “power grip,” they jabbed into tree-branch hollows where bush babies — small monkey-like mammals — sleep during the day.

After stabbing their prey repeatedly, they removed the injured or dead animal and ate it.

“It was really alarming how forceful it was,” said lead researcher Jill D. Pruetz of Iowa State University in Ames, adding that it remind-ed her of the murderous shower scene in the Alfred Hitchcock movie “Psycho.” “It was kind of scary.”

U.N. reports Iran still enriching uranium BY BOB DROGINLOS ANGELES TIMES

VIENNA, Austria — Iran has steadily expanded its program to enrich uranium and defi ed a U.N. Security Council deadline for an immediate freeze of nuclear activi-ties before it gains the capability to produce fuel for nuclear weapons, the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency said here Thursday.

The six-page report by Mo-hamed ElBaradei, head of the Inter-national Atomic Energy Agency, is almost certain to trigger moves by the Bush administration and its Eu-ropean allies for stiffer U.N. sanc-tions against the Iranian regime.

The Security Council voted unanimously in December to im-pose a 60-day deadline for Iran to unconditionally stop a pilot pro-gram that has begun small-scale uranium enrichment, as well as stop construction of a heavy water reactor and installation of a much larger enrichment facility.

But ElBaradei’s report indicat-ed that the Iranians instead have pushed the program into high-er gear since November. A se-nior United Nations’ offi cial, who briefed reporters, said there had been “no progress” in resolving the IAEA’s major outstanding con-cerns.

“There is limited cooperation,” he said. “In my view, it’s fairly limited.”

Most signifi cantly, the report confi rmed that Iran has begun in-stallation of 3,000 gas centrifug-es in an underground facility at Natanz and plans to “bring them gradually into operation by May 2007.”

If true, experts here said, the facility conceivably could produce enough enriched uranium in a year to provide enough highly enriched uranium for a nuclear bomb. Ear-lier this week, ElBaradei was quot-ed as saying he believed the facil-ity would not be operational for an-other six months.

Iran insists it will only produce low-enriched uranium to fuel ci-vilian reactors at electric power plants, but the international com-munity fears the effort could be extended to also produce weap-ons-grade material. Iran ultimately hopes to install 54,000 centrifuges, a facility large enough to fuel 20 bombs a year.

Iranian offi cials repeatedly have rebuffed IAEA requests to in-stall special cameras and other re-mote monitoring equipment at the underground site to ensure the en-richment program is for peaceful purposes, according to the report.

Offi cials in Tehran also have failed to fully explain the source of particles of high-enriched urani-um that previously were detected on equipment on the Natanz cen-trifuges and at separate technical

research center, the report said.IAEA inspectors visited Iran

earlier this week and plan to re-turn on March 3.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon, on a visit to Vienna, told reporters that he was “deeply con-cerned . . . that the Iranian govern-ment did not meet the deadline set by the Security Council.”

Iran’s nuclear activities, he added, had “great implications for peace and security, as well as non-proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.”

The focus now moves to the Se-curity Council in New York, which is expected to meet next week to consider a range of further actions against Iran.

Possible new sanctions could include a travel ban on certain Ira-nian offi cials, a prohibition against export guarantees and other fi nan-cial support for Iran, and an expan-sion of the nuclear embargo to an arms embargo.

Iran’s nuclear negotiator, Ali Larijani, fl ew to Vienna on Tuesday for last minute talks with ElBaradei. Larijani told reporters afterward that Iran was “looking for ways and means to start negotiations.”

He said Iran was prepared to provide “assurances that there would be no deviation” of material for nuclear weapons, but ruled out stopping the program outright as a precondition for talks.

Study says students are learning lessBY MITCHELL LANDSBERGLOS ANGELES TIMES

U.S. high school students are tak-ing tougher classes, receiving better grades and, apparently, learning less than their counterparts of 15 years ago.

Those were the discouraging implications of two reports issued Thursday by the federal Department of Education, assessing the perfor-mance of students in both public and private schools. Together, the reports raised sobering questions about the past two decades of educa-tional reform, including whether the movement to raise school standards has amounted to much more than window dressing.

“I think we’re sleeping through a crisis,” said David Driscoll, the Mas-sachusetts commissioner of edu-cation, during a Washington news conference convened by the Depart-ment of Education. He called the study results “stunning.”

Bruce Fuller, a professor of edu-cation and public policy at the Uni-versity of California, Berkeley, said he found the results “dismal.” After years of reforms aimed primarily at elementary schools, Fuller said the studies “certainly support shining the spotlight on the high school as a priority for reform efforts.”

The reports summarized two ma-jor government efforts to measure the performance of high school se-niors as part of the National Assess-ment of Educational Progress. One was a standardized test of 12th grad-ers conducted in 2005. The other was an analysis of the transcripts of students who graduated from high school that year.

The transcript study showed that, compared to students in simi-lar studies going back to 1990, the 2005 graduates had racked up more high school credits, had taken more

college preparatory classes and had strikingly higher grade point averag-es. The average GPA rose from 2.68 in 1990 to 2.98 — close to a solid B — in 2005.

That was the good news — or so it seemed. But the standardized test results showed that 12th grade read-ing scores have generally been drop-ping since 1992, casting doubt on what students are learning in those college prep classes.

Math scores posed a different sort of mystery, because the De-partment of Education switched to a new test in 2005 that wasn’t direct-ly comparable to those used before. Still, the results of the new test didn’t inspire confi dence: fewer than one-quarter of the 12th graders tested scored in the “profi cient” range.

The reports also showed that the gap separating white and black, and white and Hispanic students, has barely budged since the early 1990s. And while the results were not bro-ken down by state, a broad regional breakdown showed that the West and Southeast lagged well behind the Midwest and, to a lesser extent, the Northeast.

David Gordon, the Sacramento County, Calif., superintendent of schools and a participant in the De-partment of Education news con-ference Thursday, said he found it especially disturbing that the stud-ies focused on “our best students,” those who had made it to 12th grade or who had graduated.

“It’s clear to me from these data that for all of our talk of the achieve-ment gap among subgroups of stu-dents, a larger problem may be an instructional gap or a rigor gap, which effects not just some but most of our students,” Gordon said.

The reading and math test was given to 21,000 high school seniors at 900 U.S. schools, including 200 private schools. The transcript study

was based on 26,000 transcripts from 720 schools, 80 of them private. The reports did not give separate results for public vs. private schools.

Policy analysts nationwide said the studies were gloomy news for the American economy, since the country’s educational system al-ready measured poorly in interna-tional comparisons.

“What we see out of these results is a very disturbing picture of the knowledge and skills of the young people about to go into college and the workforce,” said Daria Hall, as-sistant director of the Education Trust, a Washington-based nonprof-it dedicated to improving education especially for poor and minority stu-dents.

Among other things, Hall said the transcript study provided clear evidence of grade infl ation, as well as “course infl ation” — offering high-level courses that have “the right names” but a dumbed-down curriculum.

“What it suggests is that we are telling students that they’re being successful in these courses when, in fact, we’re not teaching them any more than they were learning in the past,” she said. “So we are, in effect, lying to these students.”

Although the reports came out fi ve years after passage of President Bush’s signature education reform initiative, No Child Left Behind, Hall and others said it would be unfair to blame that program for the students’ poor showing. They were already in high school when No Child Left Be-hind was enacted, and it is primar-ily aimed at elementary and middle schools.

Driscoll recalled an earlier pres-ident’s contribution to education re-form — the Nation at Risk report that seemed to galvanize the educa-tional establishment when it was is-sued by President Reagan in 1983.

here lies one whose name was writ in water


ration to gain a clearer sense of where the Med School is head-ed in the future and to talk about the big-picture budget and capi-tal projects.”

In order to facilitate the stra-tegic planning retreat, various committees that normally meet on Friday, such as the commit-tee on advancement and the aca-demic affairs committee, will not convene until the body’s May meeting.

Last night, the committee on campus life hosted its annual town meeting with students, fac-ulty and administrators active in student life organizations. The theme this year was “Commu-nity and Brown.” Previous years have addresses facilities, inter-national student needs and di-versity issues.

Three hundred people were invited to attend the dinner in Andrews Dining Hall, and about 150 are expected to attend — one-third of them students, wrote Russell Carey ’91 MA’06, interim vice president for cam-pus life and student services, be-fore the event in an e-mail to The Herald.

The Corporation will hold its regular hour with the president and general business meeting Saturday, when members will discuss Simmons’ response to the October 2006 fi nal report of the University Steering Commit-tee on Slavery and Justice. Sim-mons said at a faculty meeting earlier this month that she would offer several proposals — some from the report and others that the committee did not recom-mend.

How — and if — the Corpo-ration will take any public action regarding the University’s his-torical ties to slavery is unclear. “The Corporation can take what-ever action it wants in response to the slavery and justice re-port,” Chapman said.

Offi cial business

Also in tomorrow’s meeting, the Corporation will elect a new

chancellor, vice chancellor, sec-retary and treasurer. Brown’s 19th chancellor, Stephen Robert ’62 P’91, has served as the Cor-poration’s top offi cial — and the president’s boss — since 1998. He reaches the limit of his term this year.

The Corporation will also ap-prove the University budget for next year and formally accept several large donations. All do-nations to the University of more than $1 million must be approved by the Corporation.

The University Resources Committee, which prepares a budget for Simmons and the Corporation to approve, is pro-posing a $704.8 million budget for next year — a 6.3 percent in-crease from this year. It is also proposing a 5 percent increase in tuition and a 10 percent high-er payout from the University’s $2.4 billion endowment, accord-ing to the committee’s February report.

In a Feb. 6 report at a faculty meeting, Provost David Kertzer ’69 P’95 P’98 said the URC’s pro-posal for a higher endowment payout refl ects strong invest-ment growth and fundraising that have bolstered the Universi-ty’s coffers by nearly $1 billion in the last six years.

But despite fundraising and investment success, the Univer-sity may be strapped for cash. The last two years’ URC bud-get reports and a Feb. 25, 2006 campus-wide e-mail from Sim-mons indicated that the Uni-versity might be constrained in its spending abilities for some time. Since then, the University has continued spending heavily to fi nance initiatives in the Plan for Academic Enrichment, such as raising graduate student sti-pends and increasing the size of the faculty. But funding cutbacks will cause the Graduate School to admit fewer students next year.

“It is clear that the Univer-sity’s aspirations will continue to require the investment of re-serves and balances for the next fi ve to seven years,” the URC re-port reads.

Corporation to discuss Med School, budget this weekend


Many students left campus last weekend in search of a brief vaca-tion, but a select few members of the women’s track team left to com-pete in one last meet before the Heptagonal Championships, which begin tomorrow. The Bears trav-eled to Boston on Sunday to race in the USA Track and Field New Eng-land Indoor Championships at Har-vard.

“This was an important last chance for some individuals to get their last breakthrough throw, jump or time in before Heps,” said Smita Gupta ’08. “Some individuals were defi nitely hoping to compete well enough to compete again at Heps next week. However, many others were hoping to use the meet as one fi nal tune-up. The sprinters, (mid-dle distance) and distance runners largely did not compete in their pri-mary events.”

Among a scattered fi eld of schools and track clubs, the Bears put together a solid meet, which will serve to ready them for the champi-onship match this weekend.

“We had a lot of personal best performances at the meet, which bodes well going into Heps,” said Director of Track and Field Craig Lake. “It demonstrates that we are peaking at the end of the season and at the right time.”

Lauren Hale ’07 started off the day by fi nishing fourth in the 60-me-ter dash with a time of 8.02, followed closely by teammate Alex Thomas ’08, who placed seventh in 8.24. In the 200-meter dash, Akilah King ’08 and Thelma Breezeatl ’10 provided a one-two punch for the Bears, fi n-ishing fi rst and second in the event with times of 24.99 and 25.09, re-spectively.

The mile also proved to be a stacked event for the team. Jenna Ridgway ’10, Ariel Wright ’10 and

Lindsay Kahn ’09 fi nished fourth, fi fth and sixth respectively. In the 800-meter run, Gupta and Brooke Giuffre ’10 ran to fourth and sev-enth place fi nishes with times of 2:14.52 and 2:17.28, respectively.

“It was really great to see that, while many team members were not competing, the large majority of the men’s and women’s team were present and that we could evoke a competitive atmosphere at a meet that would otherwise be lacking it entirely,” Gupta said.

In the 60-meter hurdles, Dianna Anderson ’09 raced to fourth with a time of 9.62. The 4x440 relay proved to be a strong event for the Bears. They fi nished behind only the Greater Boston Track Club, recording a second-place time of 4:10.90.

In the fi eld, perhaps the biggest stir came from King and Cheryl Scott ’07, both sprinters who tried their hands at the jump events for this weekend and soared to a re-sounding success.

In the long jump, Scott, Thom-as and Shannon Stone ’10 leaped to second, eighth and ninth places respectively with Scott soaring to a distance of 5.59 meters. That puts her seventh in the Ivy League.

In the triple jump, King leaped her way to silver with an 11.72-me-ter jump, putting her fourth in the Ivy League currently.

Danielle Grunloh ’10 worked her way to a gold in the shot put, throw-ing a distance of 12.96 meters.

With the biggest and fi nal com-petition of the season looming on the horizon, the Bears are getting ready.

“The main goal going into Heps is to make athletic choices that will ensure we are healthy and ready to go,” Lake said. “We need to eat, sleep and drink track and fi eld this week. We need to get focused and ready. We need to be positive and confi dent and ready to step it up.”

W. track puts forth solid effort in last pre-Heps outing

ASSISTANT SPORTS EDITOR

BY SARAH DEMERS

The men’s track team was in Bos-ton Sunday to compete in the USA Track and Field New Eng-land Indoor Championships. The individual meet was its last prep-aration for the season-ending Heptagonal Championships this weekend.

“This meet (was) … just a tune up for Heps and a last chance to get in competition experience,” said Director of Track and Field Craig Lake. “A lot of the runners raced under-distance.”

Despite the laid-back feel of the meet, the Bears got right to business in the 60-meter dash as Paul Raymond ’08 blazed to a third-place fi nish with a time of 7.03. Sean O’Brien ’09 ran to a fourth-place fi nish in the 400-me-ter run with a time of 49.83.

The mile-run showed off the squad’s depth. Four Bears fi n-ished in the top six of the event. Ozzie Myers ’08, Brian Schmidt ’09, Christian Escareno ’10 and

Duriel Hardy ’10 raced to second-, third-, fi fth- and sixth-place fi n-ishes respectively to make it one of the strongest outings of the day on the track. Myers, Schmidt and Hardy all had personal bests.

In the 800-meter run, John Loeser ’10 and Hardy notched a fourth- and sixth-place fi nish with times of 1:57.14 and 1:57.92, re-spectively. Matt Jasmin ’09 round-ed out the track competition with a fi fth place fi nish in the 60-meter hurdles with a time of 8.38.

In the fi eld, the Bears came out in full force in the long jump, stacking the event with talent en route to placing fi ve athletes in the top six. Deshaun Mars ’08 led the way with a gold-medal performance, leaping a distance of 6.69-meters. He was followed by Stephen Bernardi ’07 in sec-ond, Nkosi Still ’08 in third, Regi-nald Cole ’10 in fourth and Miles Craigwell ’09 in sixth. The differ-ence between fi rst and sixth was a mere 0.36 meters.

“I haven’t been jumping well this season, so I went into the

meet trying to fi x a couple of things in my approach and jumps and go out there and compete hard,” Mars said. “This meet just gave me a shot of confi dence go-ing into Heps. We just have to take this momentum into next week.”

In the triple jump, Cole and Craigwell came back again to score fourth and fi fth with leaps of 14.34 meters and 14.09 meters, respectively.

Bryan Powlen ’10 rounded out the day on a strong note, closing the meet with a fi rst-place fi nish in the shot put with a person-al best 16.05 meter throw. The throw was the fi fth-longest in the Ivy League this season.

“I am not surprised to see a lot of big performances occur-ring now,” Lake said. “We have a fantastic coaching staff, and we posted a ton of personal bests last year at the indoor Ivy League championships. We had a lot of throwers, jumpers, sprinters and distance kids have huge break-throughs at this time of year.”

Jumpers lead the way for m. trackASSISTANT SPORTS EDITOR

BY SARAH DEMERS

The women’s tennis team had a wildly successful weekend at home, winning all three of its matches to even its record at 3-3. On Saturday, the Bears swept Bucknell University 7-0 in the morning, defeating every oppo-nent in straight sets, then came back that afternoon to defeat the University of Massachusetts-Am-herst, 5-2. Sunday was just as im-pressive, with Brown romping over Rutgers University, 7-0.

At fi rst singles against Bucknell, Alexa Baggio ’09 defeated Paulina Gamboa 6-2, 6-1 and Emily Ellis ’10 dismissed Carlin Calcaterra 6-3, 6-2 at second singles. Tanja Vucetic ’10 continued Bruno’s dominance, outscoring her opponent 6-1, 6-1 at third singles. Kelley Kirkpat-rick ’08, Brett Finkelstein ’09 and Kathrin Sorokko ’10 also claimed victories at fourth, fi fth and sixth singles, respectively.

The duo of Michelle Pautler ’07 and Sara Mansur ’09 beat Gamboa and Calcaterra 8-3 at fi rst doubles. Kirkpatrick and Ellis claimed vic-tory at second doubles, and the third doubles team of captain Dai-sy Ames ’07 and Sorokko won as well.

Though UMass put up more of a fi ght than Bucknell did, Brown still had the last word. Ames claimed the win in fi rst singles against Michele Spiess, overcom-ing a slow start. She fought back from a 6-2 fi rst set loss, taking the last two sets 7-5, 6-4.

But the Bears dropped their matches at second and third sin-gle. Pautler lost to Masha Pozar at number two and Mansur lost to Ellen de Jong in the third position. But No. 4 Ellis, No. 5 Baggio and No. 6 Vucetic rescued the Bears

with their wins in singles play.In doubles, the fi rst and third

pairings claimed victory, high-lighted by the effort of No. 1 Paut-ler and Mansur over Spiess and de Jong, 8-2.

The Bears capped off their productive weekend on Sunday against Rutgers, with Ames win-ning against her opponent at fi rst singles, 6-1, 7-6 (6). Pautler claimed an easy victory over Ar-

lak, 6-1, 6-1 at second singles, and Mansur defeated Anela Dujsic 5-7, 6-2, 6-4 at third singles.

In doubles, both the No. 2 duo of Kirkpatrick and Ellis and the No. 3 pair of Ames and Sorokko won their respective matches.

The Bears play host again this weekend, taking on Vanderbilt University on Saturday at 10 a.m. University on Saturday at 10 a.m. University on Satand the University of Virginia on Sunday at 9:30 a.m.

W. tennis trounces opposition to even recordBY MADELEINE MARECKIASSISTANT SPORTS EDITOR

Jacob Melrose / HeraldCaptain Daisy Ames ’07 won all three of her matches this weekend.

FRIDAY,DAY,DAY FEB. 23

M. BASKETBALL: vs. Columbia, Pizzitola Center, 7 p.m.W. BASKETBALL: at ColumbiaM. ICE HOCKEY: at RPISKIING: at ECSC Regional Championships (Middlebury, Vt.)M. SWIMMING: at EISL Championships (Princ-eton, N.J.)

SATURDAY,ATURDAY,ATURDAY FEB. 24

M. BASKETBALL: vs. Cornell, Pizzitola Center, 7 p.m.W. BASKETBALL: at CornellEQUESTRIAN: at WesleyanM. HOCKEY: at UnionM. LACROSSE: at UMBCSKIING: at ECSC Regional Championships

M. SWIMMING: at EISL Championships (Princ-eton, N.J.)M. TENNIS: vs. Navy,vy,vy Pizzitola Center, 2 p.m.; , Pizzitola Center, 2 p.m.; , vs. Buffalo, , , Pizzitola Center, 7 p.m. Pizzitola Center, 7 p.m. Pizzitola CenterW. TENNIS: vs. Vanderbilt, Pizzitola Center, 10 Pizzitola Center, 10 Pizzitola Centera.m.M. & W. TRACK: at Ivy League Heptagonal Championships (New York, N.Y.)W. WATER POLO: vs. Hartwick, Smith Swim Center, 8 p.m.

SUNDAY,DAY,DAY FEB. 25

FENCING: at Ivy North (Cambridge, Mass.)GYMNASTICS: at Ivy Classic (Philadelphia, Pa.)W. LACROSSE: at North CarolinaSKIING: at ECSC Regional ChampionshipsW. TENNIS: vs. Virginia, Pizzitola Center, 10 a.m. Pizzitola Center, 10 a.m. Pizzitola CenterM. & W. TRACK: at Ivy League Heptagonal Championships (New York, N.Y.)

S P O R T S S C H E D U L E

ment was positive despite the re-sults. “All in all, the Howe Cup was a lot of fun. It’s nice to have a big culminating tournament to work toward and also to bring closure to the season,” she said.

Despite the results of the Howe Cup, LeGassick was pleased with the team’s performance through-out the season. He cited the vic-tory last weekend against Cornell and the excruciatingly close loss to Williams earlier in the season as

the highlights of the schedule this year.

Three squad members, un-named at this point, will be compet-ing at Nationals in two weeks. Re-gardless of the individual success-es, the sense of team cohesiveness was strong this year.

“Squash is inherently an individ-ual sport, and sometimes it is chal-lenging to make it team-oriented,” Lew said. “Throughout the season there was an overwhelming sense that we were playing for each other and not as 10 individuals.”

W. squash squelched in pursuit of Howe Cup



SPORTS EXTRATHE BROWN DAILY HERALDFRIDAY, FEBRUARY 23, 2007 PAGE 9

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S T A F F E D I T O R I A L

EDITORIAL & LETTERSTHE BROWN DAILY HERALD FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 23, 2007PAGE 10

A diamond to the upcoming debut of Blue State Coffee. Just diamond to the upcoming debut of Blue State Coffee. Just diamondwhat we need — another place to drink liberally.

Coal to the intrepid, anonymous roommates who keep a 14-Coal to the intrepid, anonymous roommates who keep a 14-Coalinch alligator and a cat hidden in their room. We expect that, soon enough, you’ll probably only have an alligator. But look at the bright side — you’ll probably be fi ned less for just one animal.

A diamond to tame nights at Jo’s. This must be the reason diamond to tame nights at Jo’s. This must be the reason diamondstudents haven’t contracted the norovirus — we haven’t been in contact with infected vomit recently.

Ice to rapper Sun Zoo ’08, who dropped his most recent al-bum last week, giving us the opportunity to discuss hip-hop and the Nutmeg State in the same article.

A diamond to Washington and Lincoln’s birthdays. The tra-diamond to Washington and Lincoln’s birthdays. The tra-diamondditional way to honor our greatest presidents is by sleeping for four days in a row, right?

A cubic zirconium to the Corporation. While we like the idea of a “retreat-style” meeting, is the Westin really as much as you’re willing to rough it? We’re sure you’ll bond on the way from your Heavenly Beds to the meeting room.

Coal to the juniors elected to Phi Beta Kappa for making us Coal to the juniors elected to Phi Beta Kappa for making us Coalfeel horribly inadequate. Fortunately for us, living well is the best revenge.

A diamond to the two students who engaged in a friendly fi st-fi ght on Patriots Court before being broken up by DPS. That makes us think of a possible, um, “altercation” between our-selves and another campus publication … but maybe they’re scared we won’t be friends after we win.

Cubic zirconium to Brown and RISD’s joint degree program, which reminds us of a tenuous custody agreement. Okay, you can go up the Hill to Daddy’s for one year and then to Mom-my’s for the next year, but don’t ask to go down the block for visits on the weekends. They just can’t work it out.

Coal to all you aspiring investment bankers taking Econ 11. Coal to all you aspiring investment bankers taking Econ 11. CoalBe Brown students — take queer studies, read Kant, avoid math for four years … and then go to Wall Street.

Grad School needs to set fair funding policy

As graduate students in the Department of English, we are writing in response to Dean of the Graduate School Sheila Bonde’s letter to the editor (“Grad school dean addresses new funding policy,” Feb. 9). In her letter, Bonde expresses her intention to correct “misconcep-tions” regarding changes to graduate student funding and their effects on the quality of undergraduate educa-tion at Brown.

It is Bonde’s letter that misrepresents the conse-quences of the proposed funding changes. The serious negative effects such changes will have for undergrad-uate instruction and graduate student professionaliza-tion are hardly conveyed by the rosy scenario put forth by the University.

Here are the facts. We in the English department learned about the proposal to revoke sixth- and sev-enth-year funding in a mid-semester Fall 2006 note from the dean, leaving those of us in our fi fth and sixth years of study little or no time to apply for external fund-ing. To date, the Graduate School has yet to adopt a concrete and consistent position on the funding of grad students beyond their fi fth year of study. Given that all of us have been meeting teaching and research require-ments only achievable over the course of a minimum of six years, it will be impossible to adjust to the demands of the truncated timeframe without signifi cant compro-mises in the quality of our work, both as researchers and as teachers of undergraduates.

According to the most recent data collected by the Modern Language Association in 2000-2001, students in English graduate programs devote an average of 8.2

years to attaining a Ph.D. Understandably, we are opposed to funding changes

that will have profound adverse effects on graduate stu-dent professionalization and undergraduate education at Brown. This is why we are voicing our concerns in the pages of The Herald. While we appreciate Bonde’s willingness to meet with concerned grad students dur-ing her open offi ce hours, an issue of such importance to the University ought to be discussed in a public and transparent manner.

Our sincere hope is that that the administration will remain committed to the Plan for Academic Enrichment by allocating the modest funds necessary for the Grad School to develop a fair and competitive funding policy that serves the interests of all Brown students by safeguarding and enhancing Brown’s standing among its peer institutions.

David Babcock MA’04 GS, Christine Baumgarthuber GS, Jeff Covington GS,

John Funchion GS, Khristina Gonzalez GS, Austin Gorman GS, Weihsin Gui MA’05 GS,

Chris Holmes MAT’00 GS, Kerin Holt MA’03 GS, Jonna Iacono GS, Stephen Koelz MA’04 GS,

Jeannette Lee MA’06 GS, David Liao GS, Michelle Malonzo GS, Corey McEleney GS,

John Melson GS, Sarah Osment GS, Laurel Rayburn MA’06 GS, Jennifer Schnepf GS, John Schroeder GS, Hannah Sikorski MA’06 GS,

Emily Steinlight MA’05 GS, Brian Sweeney MA’05 GS, Jacqueline Wernimont MA’05 GS, Jason Zysk GS

To the Editor:

An article in Thursday’s Herald (“UCS voices support for socially responsible investing,” Feb. 22), incorrectly reported that UCS unanimously passed a change to the UCS code that would require the chair of the Student Activities Committee to decide each fall whether to put forth a proposal to change the student activities fee. UCS Student Activities Committee Chair Hugh Livengood ’07 only introduced such a motion to change the UCS code — it was not voted on.

An article in The Herald (“Site-specifi c art installation evokes spirit of Sarah Doyle,” Feb. 9) incorrectly spelled the name of Liz Nofziger, the artist who created the installation.

An article in Thursday’s Herald (“W. swimming and diving comes in 6th at Ivy League Championships at Princeton,” Feb. 22) incorrectly spelled the name of Bailey Langner ’10 and identifi ed her as a member of the class of 2009.

C O R R E C T I O N S

Diamonds and coal

OPINIONSTHE BROWN DAILY HERALDFRIDAY, FEBRUARY 23, 2007 PAGE 11

Banner is good for BrownFacebook groups can be pretty trivial. They tend to be either inside jokes or groups of “Family Guy” fans. So when News Feed, the oft-maligned Facebook institution, informed me that over 15 of my “friends” had joined “Brown Against Banner,” a Facebook group which had over 500 members at the time, I in-vestigated with a grain of salt.

What I found was a harsh indictment of Banner, Brown’s new computer software, which — according to Brown’s Banner Web site — will “integrate its student information data including admission, registration, billing and fi nancial aid.”

The anti-Banner Facebook group, which had 739 members when this column was writ-ten, focuses on Banner’s effect on class regis-tration and links to a petition with, at the mo-ment, 169 signatures. The group page lists many problems with Banner, including its principal accusation that Banner “(threatens)

to violate the very ethos of our open curricu-lum.” “Worst of all,” reads the site, “students continue to be kept in the dark.”

Contrary to what “Brown Against Banner” would have you believe, Banner is a necessary and benefi cial addition to the University. Not only will it improve the registration process by making it easier and more effi cient, but it is also a necessary step in modernizing Brown to compete with other high-caliber universi-ties.

Banner, though not simply a registration program, improves registration in a few im-portant ways. First, class registration will now be done primarily online. Instead of using add/drop forms and pre-registration cards, students will go online to choose their next se-mester’s courses. Banner will allow students to add and drop courses online, without going to the registrar’s offi ce for most changes. This will make course selection and the shopping period signifi cantly more effi cient.

Additionally, Banner will enforce prerequi-sites and enrollment limits that are decided by the professor. I interviewed University Regis-trar Michael Pesta, who said this will decrease the number of overfl owing classrooms during shopping period, making it easier for profes-sors to fi nalize their class rosters and start teaching. Before you start to fret, however, keep in mind that it will still be possible to get around limitations on registration with profes-sor permission. Because professors can over-ride any Banner limitation on registration, the registration process changes, but the philoso-

phy remains. Thus, the ability to experiment with different classes exists just as it did be-fore — students just need to be more proac-tive in communicating with their professors.

Finally, Banner will integrate various parts of each student’s college life, centralizing our information in one place. I am looking forward to having fi nancial aid information, billing, registration and grades all under the same on-line account instead of communicated to me through many different messengers.

One explanation for the strong opposition to Banner is the misinformation contained on the Facebook profi le for “Brown against Ban-ner.” According to the Facebook group, reg-istration under Banner will “violate” Brown’s current curricular structure because it will enforce prerequisites. A letter to The Herald (“Banner may end ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ regis-tration policy,” Feb. 12) also raised this issue. Thankfully, this claim is simply false. The phi-losophy of the Brown curriculum, easily found on Brown’s Web site, “rests on the conviction that students need to be active participants in their own educations.” The philosophy also emphasizes “intellectual growth” and “moral character” development. Nowhere does it out-law prerequisites.

Pesta, who heartily encourages student feedback on Banner, explained that prerequi-sites have always been part of the New Curric-ulum. When I spoke with him, he emphasized, “We’re all in this together. I don’t understand this ‘us against them’ mentality.”

The registrar is absolutely correct. Admin-istrators, who are evaluated in part on their ability to improve student life, have no incen-tive to make registration unpleasant for stu-dents.

Brown Against Banner’s charge that stu-dents have been “kept in the dark” is wholly false. Not only is there a Banner Web site ex-plaining the new registration process, but ac-cording to Brown’s former vice president for computing and information services, Ellen Waite-Franzen, Brown has made multiple at-tempts to include students in the process. In an e-mail, Franzen wrote, “(There) were quite a few other options along the way for students to learn more about the system” including several open forums that only two or three students attended. At a Tuesday night Ban-ner forum last week, fewer than 20 students showed up. If students are in the dark, it is their own fault.

Banner does have certain drawbacks. Pri-marily, it relies on professors to be very re-sponsive and tech savvy in overriding Banner to let students into a class. While I don’t ques-tion the dedication of Brown professors, I of-ten question their computer literacy and their response time when it comes to e-mail. “The system for professors to do overrides is ter-rible,” said Dan Leventhal ’07, a concentrator in computer science and one of Mocha’s cre-ators. Those in charge of Banner should work especially hard to make the professor over-ride function an easy one.

Banner will not revolutionize the way we register for classes, but it will make stu-dents’ lives easier by giving them the power to change classes from their dorm rooms. It will make preregistration more important in class selection, rewarding proactive students who plan ahead. Additionally, it will help mod-ernize our technology and integrate the differ-ent departments so that Brown can become a truly modern university.

The transition period will defi nitely be bumpy, but students will survive. After all, re-sisting Banner is not only foolish — it’s futile.

Ben Bernstein ’09 writes a regular column on campus issues. If there is an issue you would

like to bring to his attention, email [email protected].

Why I love Brown and not BannerI came to Brown because it offered something I could not fi nd anywhere else. I remember having to weigh my options carefully, such that even the most absurd of minutia became weighty portents. My whirlwind col-lege tour culminated in a pile of bro-chures, pamphlets, notes and business cards sprawled across my desk –— “Yes,” they whispered, “read us … we are singular in our design, and we will help make your college decision an in-formed one.”

Even as I girded my loins for the fi rst work of literature — my Fiske Guide open and pen ready for cross-ref-erencing — I knew that they deceived me. They were all the same gaudy bill-boards lining the education fast-track.

As a matter of form, I waded through the plumage, crowded by so much pomp and erudition. It was a strange feeling, to be so far away from the ideal of academic greatness, merely a pre-frosh, and yet to receive so many courtships in the mail, more each day, asking for my hand and my $45,000 per annum dowry.

Ultimately, however, I knew that I could not marry a college that I did not love. By this time, my choices had been narrowed down to those of a pre-cocious and adaptable student. Yale of-fered me architecture, residential col-leges and a wealth of local community service opportunities. Princeton of-fered me tweed, prestige, Toni Morri-son and a gilded, leather-bound thesis. Harvard offered me deferred admis-sion, which was to be expected.

And Brown? Brown offered me free-dom. It offered grand-mal battles be-tween libertarians and hippies. It of-fered huge phalluses scrawled in green and blue sidewalk-chalk advertising M-Sex. It offered free cross-registration with the Rhode Island School of De-sign and the nation’s only free-standing Department of Egyptology and Ancient Western Asian Studies. And most of all, it offered the freedom of an absurdly fl exible registration system.

Now you can see where this is go-ing. On Feb. 7, I picked up a copy of The Herald and was surprised to fi nd myself labeled in print as being one of about 750 “highly critical” students op-posed to the implementation of the Ban-ner registration system. I’m not exactly sure what “highly critical” denotes in context, but if I understand correctly, it means that I am carefully discerning and take my education very seriously. I therefore thank The Herald for its com-pliment.

I will capitalize on some of The Her-ald’s research by quoting its source, Registrar Michael Pesta: “Banner will simply allow us to implement the struc-tures of registration that have been in place all along: prerequisites, caps, et cetera.”

I say: “False.” How many prefrosh or freshmen have been secretly advised, “Don’t worry. Just show up to class, do the course-work, meet with the profes-sor and try really hard. In all likelihood, you will get in.” Not only have I heeded this advice, but I have also dispensed it, many times over. Currently, I am regis-tered in two incredible classes that the implementation of Banner would have made it much more diffi cult to get into. In my opinion, Brown’s current system represents the real world — where es-tablishing connections, showing dedi-cation and possessing moxie often pay

off.Additionally, it is important to note

that not all faculty are as pleased with the proposed new system as Professor of Cognitive and Linguistic Sciences Steven Sloman. At the risk of widening the implicit rivalry between the scienc-es and the humanities, it is in the lat-ter fi eld that I asked my own questions. Of the two professors of English and one of history that I questioned, none liked the idea or spirit of Banner, and one has been actively resisting its im-plementation since it was fi rst brought to the table. Humanities classes are of-ten smaller, more fl exible and less for-mulaic than math and the sciences, and students and professors in the humani-ties stand to suffer considerable incon-venience from a formulaic mass-regis-tration system.

Such legendary Brown greats as Ira Magaziner ’69 P’06 P’07 P’10 would be, I trust, somewhat displeased with the way that Banner has been handled by the administration, just as I am sure the administration is less than pleased with its exorbitant cost. We are still the students of this University, and there is still time to include us in the imple-mentation process to ensure that our freedom goes untrammeled. To merely buckle under to the spoken assurance that “There is nothing about our curric-ulum and our courses that Banner will change” would be a sad complacency indeed.

I strongly encourage all who are able to attend one of the public forums held next week and to stay informed. The fact of the matter is that Banner will change our academic experience here at Brown, and it is our job and the job of UCS to help ensure that it chang-es for the better. Our education here is not about fl ash, easy convenience or keeping up with the Joneses. It is about that certain special feeling that we can’t quite shake, when we fi nally realize, “I love it here.”

Finn Yarbrough ’09 doesn’t want to wake up next to a University he never

would have attended sober.

BY FINN YARBROUGHGUEST COLUMNIST

BY BEN BERNSTEINCAMPUS ISSUES COLUMNIST

P O I N TCOUNTERPOINT

Banner: Boon or bane?

SPORTS WEEKENDTHE BROWN DAILY HERALDFRIDAY, FEBRUARY 23, 2007 PAGE 12

Last weekend, Daisy Ames ’07 helped lead the women’s tennis team to three wins over Buck-nell University, the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and Rutgers University. Ames paced the Bears by winning all fi ve of her matches over the weekend, including two victories at No. 1 singles and three victories at No. 3 doubles. Against the Minute-women, Ames rallied back for a 2-6, 7-5, 6-4 win in a three-hour long match. Ames is 11-5 since the fall and will be back in ac-tion against Vanderbilt Universi-ty and University of Virginia this weekend.

Herald: How important was this weekend for the team?

Ames: It was a great weekend for us. We came into the week-end 0-3 and left 3-3. We did what we were supposed to do, and that’s what’s most rewarding. I had lost to Michele Speises from UMass last year, so beating her

this time felt good. She was more or less blowing me off the court in the fi rst set, and she was up in the second. My coach and team-mates helped me turn things around. I remember one in-stance where my coach told me I had to get fi red up. I felt the pres-sure from him expecting me to win that match, and I knew that I had to clear my head and buckle down to win. I was down 4-3 in the second set and then won it 7-5 and then won the third set 6-4. It was nice to know I have con-trol over situations and can make

changes. It was worth the three hours.

Was that the longest match you’ve ever played?

One day I played a three-and-a-half-hour match followed by a three-hour match. I won them both. Yeah, I defi nitely ate des-sert that night. Maybe two.

What do you think of your 11-

5 record on the season? I’m OK with it. But I can’t help

but to think about the fact that three of my fi ve losses were in tiebreakers. I always revert back to what I did or changed in my train of thought. I haven’t come up with any concrete answers … yet.

What has been the best part of this season?

Well, if you include the fall semester, I really enjoyed play-ing the Eastern Collegiate Ten-nis Tournament at Army, which I won. It was so pretty there and awesome seeing the parachuters drop in and land on the 50-yard line at the football stadium.

When did you start playing tennis?

I didn’t really start playing tennis until I moved to New York City when I was 14 years old from Atlanta. I played on some courts on the Lower West Side that have since been demolished

Ames ’07 of w. tennis aiming for strong fi nal campaignSPORTS STAFF WRITER

There comes a point when you re-alize that an athlete has established himself as a great player. Some-

times it’s when you don’t wish but rather ex-pect him or her to come through with the big play in the fi nal min-utes. Other times, it’s when an athlete im-

pacts the game with his or her mere presence or simply with the threat of doing something spectacular.

In what has been an up-and-down season for the men’s basket-ball team, co-captain Mark McAn-drew ’08 has taken his game to an-other level, making the big plays down the stretch and affecting the game even when he doesn’t have the ball. But if you ask me, McAn-drew has arrived in another impres-sive sense. Along with Head Coach Craig Robinson, he has started to dwell on even his smallest mis-takes, never satisfi ed regardless of his fi nal stat line.

Take last Friday’s 70-66 triumph over Harvard. McAndrew fi nished with 19 points on a stellar 6-of-9 shooting and threw in a couple of hustle plays to begin the second half that energized his team and broke the game open. It was an ef-fort more than worthy of the pro-verbial gold star, yet McAndrew still found things to critique.

“We defi nitely had some spurts where we weren’t executing well, and it’s probably my fault since I got a little lazy with the ball,” he said. “I didn’t let the action come to me as much as I should.”

Sure, he fi nished with four turn-overs, but with the style of basket-ball the Bears play and the amount that McAndrew handles the ball, four turnovers is a more than rea-sonable number. And if he actually went through stretches of forcing the issue, it didn’t last long, as his high shooting percentage showed. But he fi nished the game feeling that there was room for improve-ment — as did his coach.

“We won in spite of the fact that Mark didn’t have a good game,” Robinson said. “Isn’t that some-thing … 6-for-9 isn’t good enough for this kid?”

Either Robinson’s standards of excellence are absurdly high or he was just doing what good coaches do and keeping his star player hun-gry. Regardless, it says something when both coach and player can have such a ho-hum attitude to-ward such a solid performance.

The modesty didn’t stop after the Harvard game.

McAndrew pulled down a team-high 11 rebounds during the fol-lowing night’s 20-point blowout of Dartmouth, but his initial response upon seeing his stats was, “Yeah, I guess I had a lot of rebounds.” Granted, a double-digit rebound game is not a novelty for McAn-drew, seeing as he grabbed 13 ear-lier in the season against Cornell. But give yourself a little credit. Be a little boastful about your bur-geoning reputation in the Ancient Eight.

Rest assured, neither McAn-drew nor Robinson will ever let the other be satisfi ed, regardless

McAndrew humbly hits his stride

BY MARCO SANTINI

W. squash squelched in pursuit of Howe Cup

The women’s squash team fought hard against three of the strongest teams in the country last weekend in the Howe Cup held at Yale. But the grueling weekend yielded no wins for the Bears, and they fi nished the sea-son ranked eighth in the coun-try. Bruno fell Friday to No. 1 Princeton 9-0, Saturday to Trin-ity College 8-1 and Sunday to Dartmouth 8-1.

Brown was overmatched by the Tigers Friday. Princeton had not lost a match all season, in-cluding a 9-0 victory over Brown earlier in the year. After blank-ing Brown Friday, Princeton went on to win the Howe Cup by beating Harvard, 6-3.

“(Princeton’s) not the stron-gest at the top, but they are a very deep team,” said co-captain Katie Lew ’07.

Indeed, against the Tigers Brown was more successful at the top of their ladder than at the bottom. Megan Cerullo ’08 was the only player to win a game for Brown at the No. 2 position. She took the second game of her match 9-6, but Princeton’s Neha Kumar took the fi nal two to secure the 3-1 victory. Co-cap-tain Erin Andrews ’07 was serv-ing for game but lost the second game of her match 10-9 at the No. 1 slot. Andrews injured her ankle Friday, leaving Bruno’s lineup in limbo all weekend, but she played in all three matches.

The loss threw the team into the consolation bracket where it faced Trinity on Saturday. Brown lost 8-1 to the Bantams earlier this season, but Satur-day’s match was competitive with a number of games fi nish-ing 9-7 and 10-8. The lone victo-ry came from Kali Schellenberg ’10 who fi nished the season on fi re, winning six of her last seven matches.

On Sunday, Brown faced Dartmouth, who had defeated the Bears 6-3 on Feb. 4. Brown had been expecting to play Wil-liams College, the No. 7 seed going in, but Williams shocked Dartmouth on Saturday to ad-vance to the 5-6 match-up on Sunday against Trinity.

“Our team went into the tour-nament mentally prepared to play Williams, as we have for at least the past fi ve years,” Lew said. “We were a bit thrown off when we ended up playing Dart-mouth for the No. 7 spot.”

Brown had lost by a narrow 5-4 margin on Feb. 3 to Williams in an intense match. The Bears had been seeking their revenge since and facing Dartmouth on the third day of a long weekend was a tough task.

Lew admitted, “Everyone was tired, mentally and physi-cally, and had to focus and push themselves harder to compen-sate.” Andrews also said the team had been on the road for the past three weekends prior to the Howe Cup.

Despite the circumstances, Brown battled the Big Green. Schellenberg again came through with the lone victory. Breck Haynes ’09 and Charlotte Steel ’09 were both barely edged out in fi ve games despite strong performances.

Head Coach Stuart LeGassick felt the team was very competi-tive against the Big Green. “The Dartmouth match … was closer than it looks, with two matches going to fi ve and one where we had match balls but were unable to convert,” he said.

The lopsided losses were not for lack of effort. “The Howe Cup didn’t go as we had initially hoped, but I feel the team played well through and through,” An-drews said.

Lew agreed that the tourna-

BY JASON HARRISCONTRIBUTING WRITER

NBA All-Star Weekend notesThe NBA All-Star weekend is prob-ably the only All-Star experience I enjoy. We’ve been treated to Mari-ah Carey (when she was still really hot/not crazy) in her skin-tight Mi-chael Jordan jersey-dress. We get a chance to see the young studs of

the league in the Rookie-Sopho-more Game. There’s the al-ways-entertain-ing dunk con-test, and then there’s usually at least one real-ly great quarter

of basketball in the actual All-Star game. This year, however, was a gi-ant disappointment.

The Celebrity GameI was pretty excited until I real-

ized that no one was going to kick the crap out of Bow Wow and that Michael Clarke Duncan couldn’t dunk. Also, it would be nice if I had heard of some of the “celebrities” that played in the game. I guess I should just watch more Food Net-work and pay more attention to the male actors on those ABC prime-time shows about how much make-up 30- and 40-year-olds need to look like they’re 20.

The Charles Barkley-Dick Bevetta Race

Once again, I had high hopes for this, but it quickly became painful to watch once it started and everyone realized that the 67-year-old man wasn’t going to beat the 43-year-old fat former professional athlete. I think I was laughing, but only be-cause I was trying to convince my-self that it wasn’t sad that Bevetta’s knee was bleeding. Still, this could easily have been the highlight of the weekend.

The Rookie-Sophomore GameThis is the worst rookie class

since 2000, so you knew coming in it wasn’t going to be a good game, but if I wanted to see players dunk-

continued on page 6

continued on page 9

Tom TrudeauTru Story

continued on page 6

continued on page 6

Jacob Melrose / HeraldMark McAndrew ’08 is leading the Ivy League in scoring in conference play with 19.5 points per game.

Chris MahrMahrtian Encounters

ATHLETE OF THE WEEK

friday, february 23, 2007

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