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BUDGET from 1 DISTRIBUTION Distribution Coordinator Karl Etters 850-561-1608 [email protected] Students protest Charles Koch’s 2008 donation to Florida State University, totaling $1.5 million. Daniel Tope Single copies are free; additional copies are available for $1 per copy. Mailing Address: P. O. Box 20208 Tallahassee, FL 32316 The FSView & Florida Flambeau is a Gannett newspaper pub- lished by FSView & Florida Flam- beau, Inc. Staff Writer Joseph La Belle/FSView
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NEWS FSVIEW & FLORIDA FLAMBEAU | MAY 16, 2011PAGE 2
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concerns about the pay cut and the detrimental budget crisis to the Talla-hassee Democrat.
“I think it’s catastrophic for our faculty to take a pay cut,” Barron said. “We’re struggling right now just to hold on to our faculty.”
Students have realized the harm that inadequate teachers can pose. Sammy Jo Evansen, an FSU junior majoring in editing, writ-ing and media said she al-ready feels the effects.
“There are more pro-fessors teaching classes for the fi rst time, which can really be a detriment to the student’s learning experience,” Evansen said “It’s a better learn-ing environment when the teacher has mastered the subject or taught the class before.”
The fact that no funding will be provided for pro-grams such as the Major Gift Matching Program or the Courtelis Facility Matching Program, which match scholarship endow-ments and facilities dollar for dollar to the donor’s gift, is being considered a severe problem. There is currently more than $200 million pending on the eli-gible match list statewide.
FSU will have to push for different types of fundraising through the
Boosters and donations. Barron has been heavily committed to garnering more alumni donations and gifts. In an interview in February with the FS-View, Barron stated that he is determined to raise copious amounts of mon-ey for FSU programs.
“I want to beat all the re-cords,” Barron said. “I’m not competitive, though, but I do want to beat all the records,” Barron said. 62 universities right now have billion-dollar endow-ments; it’s time to be in that company. That can have a tremendous impact on our programs.”
FSU’s budget defi cit sparks the question about whether FSU will have to rely more heavily on controversial controlled donations, such as the recent Koch Charitable Foundation donation where the donor arguably has some say on how the money is used, down to deciding which professors can teach and eliminating those who do not meet the donor’s standards.
For students, the raise in tuition and losses in Bright Futures scholar-ships has not been re-ceived well. Reed Schle-singer, a senior from Boca Raton, said that, in order to stay fi nancially stable, he would have to pick up
more hours at the law fi rm where he works.
“I feel that is going to hurt a lot of students who can’t afford their educa-tion, because they will have to obtain jobs, which will give them less time to study for their classes,” said Schlesinger.
The strain is even harder on out-of-state students. On top of paying full tu-ition without a Bright Futures scholarship, they face an additional 8 per-cent increase in tuition price on top of the manda-tory 8 percent raise.
Logan Rees is an out-of-state senior majoring in fi lm. He said that he feels that it is unfair for him to have to pay so much when the fi lm school can’t af-ford to provide him with enough equipment to make a movie.
“I feel like I’m getting cheated, because I am paying so much more than everyone, but then I’m not getting everything I need to make my movie,” Rees said.
With a large number of majors being cut, offi ces giving up phones to lessen the budget and advising for majors being cut or merged, students have been feeling like their education is being com-promised and is not com-plete.
Andrew Ciffone, a se-nior majoring in English, said that the only thing he can be grateful for is his upcoming graduation. He transferred to FSU last year from UCF.
“I’m just happy about graduating soon, because I have noticed a lot of schools cutting a lot of things because of budget cuts.” Ciffone said. “I had a friend from UCF who was going to transfer with me, but they cut her ma-jor here.”
Schlesinger mentioned that he has noticed the li-brary is not open as much and that, in most of his classes, they are giving out fewer materials, and the classes are much larg-er: Students want to feel like their education is be-ing justifi ed by the tuition increase.
“If I am going to have to pay more for my educa-tion, I would like to see that I have a quality edu-cation that includes top-notch professors and ade-quate class size,” Evansen said.
In a statement to the public, the Chancellor of the State University System Frank T. Brogan seemed to be content with the results of the state budget.
“The fi nal budget as proposed allows us to
remain steadfast as we continue the challeng-ing work to sustain and strengthen both the qual-ity and competitiveness of the State University System,” Brogan said. “We are turning a corner, and we are seeing early indications of the reversal of the economically driv-en trend that was our col-lective situational reality in Florida. The State Uni-versity System also has a notable partnership and shared governance with the Florida Legislature–one that balances tuition costs with our No. 1 joint priority: student access to the state of Florida’s pub-lic universities.”
Meanwhile, Nissley said she is worried about her upcoming senior year. She said she is going to have to try and fi gure out a way to get good grades, while also working increased hours as a student am-bassador for university visitors and at Bill’s Book-store.
“It’s really upsetting be-cause I worked hard in high school to make sure I had the requirements for 100 percent Bright Futures,” Nissley said. “For them to slowly take it away with tuition in-creases and cutting Bright Futures is completely un-fair.”
BUDGET from 1
“Donor gifts have al-ways been accepted with the clear understanding that the gift will not com-promise that integrity or infringe on the academic freedom of our highly re-garded faculty,” said Bar-ron.
To ensure his message got across, Barron him-self wrote an opinion arti-cle for the St. Petersburg Times, the newspaper that fi rst broke the story in a May 10 article. Barron’s article, which appeared in print on Friday, May 13, claimed that the May 10 St. Petersburg Times article and subsequent May 11 editorial “made a number of claims about Florida State Univer-sity’s relationship with a prominent philanthropic organization that are far off the mark.”
He went on to detail the Koch Foundation pledge, which, accord-ing to Barron, entailed the establishment of a program for the study of political economy and free enterprise and a pro-gram for excellence in economic education, as well as allow for the hir-ing of two assistant pro-fessors for the programs. Barron then continued on to state that the St. Pe-
tersburg Times reporter in charge of the May 10 article “misconstrued the facts” when she claimed that “Koch rejected nearly 60 percent of the faculty’s suggestions,” in turn, leaving the faculty, according to reporter Kris Hundley, with only an “illusion of control” in hiring practices. In a bul-let-style format, Barron explained the apparent misunderstanding in his own words.
According to Barron, more than 500 individu-als applied for the two positions made possible by the foundation’s dona-tion. From there, the De-partment of Economics’ Executive Committee, made up of department
faculty, approved around 50 applicants for further consideration to an advi-sory board approved by the Koch Foundation.
Here is where the heart of the debate stems: When word spread of the existence of an advisory board approved by the Koch Foundation, indi-viduals such as Bellamy and Miller took a stand against it.
“From our reading of the memorandum, the Koch Foundation has some say over who is hired from the grant and what will be taught,” said Bellamy and Miller in their “My View” article.
Bellamy and Miller claimed that the agree-ment came with condi-
tions that they consid-ered “seriously damaging to academic freedom.” In essence, they argued that the hiring power had shifted away from the de-partment faculty and into the hands of the Koch Foundation by allowing them the opportunity to determine which candi-dates qualify for hire and funding.
According to Barron, however, that is simply not the case. The adviso-ry board, which is in fact approved by the Koch Foundation, consists of two FSU faculty members and a Ph.D. economist appointed by the founda-tion, but it does not, ac-cording to Barron, have the fi nal say. Instead, the advisory board reviewed the 50 applicants and nar-rowed the list down to 16 individuals.
In the end, he said, the two individuals chosen for the position did not come from the 16 rec-ommended by the Koch-approved committee, but instead, from the original pool of 50 and from a sep-arate group of individuals applying for another posi-tion.
In closing, Barron reit-erated his point that the Koch Foundation exerts
no overarching power over the university.
“The Koch Foundation does not hire faculty,” said Barron. “Nor does it exercise control over course curricula. Aca-demic freedom has not been compromised in any way.”
FSU is not the only school to receive fund-ing from the Koch Foun-dation, nor is the Koch Foundation the only com-pany donating money to the university. FSU also entered into an agree-ment with BB&T, who provided funding for a course on business ethics and economics.
In any case, Barron said FSU had never and will never allow donations to affect the decisions taken by university faculty.
“And no matter how much innuendo Hundley and the editors at the St. Petersburg Times wish to employ, Florida State University makes deci-sions to establish pro-grams and hire the appro-priate faculty based on academic needs, not po-litical motivations of do-nors or anyone else,” Bar-ron said. “Florida State is diligent and resolute in maintaining its academic integrity.”
Joseph La Belle/FSViewStudents protest Charles Koch’s 2008 donation to Florida State University, totaling $1.5 million.
DONATION from 1
KATHERINE CONCEPCIONStaff Writer
A recent children’s books study led by a Florida State University sociologist has shown that throughout the 20th century there has been bias toward males as lead characters.
The journal Gender & Society published the study, “Gender in Twen-tieth–Century Children’s Books: Patterns of Dis-parity in Titles and Cen-tral Characters,” which looked at almost 6,000 books published be-tween 1900 and 2000.
Two FSU profes-sors, Janice McCabe and Daniel Tope, along with Emily Fairchild of New College of Florida, Liz Grauerholz of the University of Central Florida and Bernice A. Pescosolido of Indiana University published the study.
The researchers be-came interested in study-ing the topic because of
the large amount of time kids spend consuming media.
“Despite great studies, we had an incomplete understanding of gen-der in children’s books,” said McCabe, assistant professor of sociology,
who led the study.
The find-ings show that the equality of r e p r e s e n -tation be-tween male and female
characters was closely tied to the rise and fall of the women’s movement throughout the century.
“I expected represen-tations to start off some-what unequal in the 1900s and thought it would get better over time, but the first three centuries were very similar to the last three centuries,” said McCabe. “Images change with the position of women in society and gender activism.”
The middle of the 20th
century, between about 1930 until 1969, was the most male dominated, due to backlash against feminism.
The early 20th cen-tury saw the women’s suffrage movement, and the last few decades saw
the second-wave femi-nist move-ment.
“Follow-ing the on-set of the w o m e n ’ s movement in the ’60s
and ’70s, greater gender parity for central char-acters became more normative,” Daniel Tope, co-author and fellow as-sistant professor of soci-ology said to FSU.com. “This suggests a histori-cal link between gender politics and gender rep-resentations in print.”
Other findings includ-ed that over 50 percent of children’s books pub-lished every year feature males as central charac-ters, and an average of
36.5 percent of books every year contain titles relating to a male char-acter, compared to 17.5 percent of books titled after a female character.
The disparity was seen in books depicting ani-mals as well. Even with the third-wave feminist movement in the 1990s, the ratio for male to fe-male representations of animals was about two to one.
Despite the theory that publishers may choose to use animals as a stand-in for floating, sexless rep-resentation in a story, the authors of the study discovered that, there is more inequality among genders in books about animals.
There is also the issue that a supposed gender-neutral character will be seen as male gendered by default.
“The pattern supports the belief that female characters are less im-portant and interesting than male characters,” said McCabe. “This af-
fects how kids think about themselves in so-ciety and may contribute to a sense of unimpor-tance among girls, privi-lege among boys.”
McCabe encourages students who have an in-terest in pursuing similar studies or writing and publishing books with strong female leads to do so.
“There are gender-neu-tral books out there, but there are certainly more books about male char-acters and animals than females,” said McCabe. “Children are getting ex-posed to these patterns not only in the children’s books that we studied, but in other aspects of media. We hope that this research will raise awareness of the issue among parents reading [these] books, authors, illustrators, publishers.”
The full study is avail-able for free online, and may be read at http://gas.sagepub.com/con-tent/25/2/197. fu l l .pdf+html.
FSU study fi nds gender bias in booksReview shows overwhelming amount of male representation
Janice Mc-Cabe
Daniel Tope
