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November 6, 2009, Volume 204 >> Number 54 >> 40 cents >> iowastatedaily.com >> An independent newspaper serving Iowa State since 1890 FRIDAY

Budget Cuts Campus Representatives

Student regent to return

Comic Strip Contest

ISU Extension reorganized

Pilot program to be introduced

Alumnus makes the finals

Exact amounts not yet defined for DPS

By Whitney SagerDaily Staff Writer

The English department will implement a pilot program for in-troductory classes during the spring 2010 semester.

The program involves changing the way classes are taught, but it will not cause an increase in class sizes.

“It won’t change the nature of the course, per say, in terms of re-quirements or the goals and objectives of the course,” said Charles Kostelnick, professor and chairman of the English department. “But the way it’s taught will change, to some extent.”

The classes that will take part in the pilot program include English 150 and 250.

“The majority of our sections of English 150 and 250 will be offered in a traditional format this spring, meaning just as they’ve always been — one instructor per 26 students,” said Barbara Blakely, associate pro-

see ENGLISH on PAGE 8

By Bethany PintDaily Staff Writer

Bruce Bearinger used to have an 18.5-mile commute to work. Travel time took about 25 minutes.

This was before the budget cuts hit Iowa State this spring. Now, Bearinger’s commute is 72 miles, mostly on Highway 20. Instead of 25 minutes on the road, it takes him more than an hour.

Bearinger was a county extension director in Bu-

see EXTENSION on PAGE 8

Kostelnick

By Sara Schlueter Daily Staff Writer

Inspired by his experiences liv-ing in small-town Iowa, ISU alum-nus Eric Gapstur is among the top 10 finalists in the “Comic Strip Su-perstar” contest.

Gapstur graduated from Iowa State with a degree in art and de-sign and was among 5,000 other artists who entered their comic strips for a chance to win a full publishing contract with Andrews McMeel Publishing. The company sponsored the contest and plans to distribute the winning comic strips as a published book.

The inspiration for Gapstur’s comic, “Belle Plaine,” came from his own experiences living in Iowa.

“The characters in the comic strip are based on the friends and

personalities that I knew,” Gapstur said.

The comic profiles the day-to-day ad-ventures of two fifth-grade boys, Josh and Collin-gwood, who live in a small town.

Gapstur said he has been draw-ing and sketching comic strips for as long as he can remember.

“I have been doing this since I could hold a pencil,” Gapstur said.

In college, Gapstur explored the art of comics by working at the Iowa State Daily as a cartoon-ist and then Mayhem Collectibles, Inc. in Campustown doing store inventory.

“Working at the Iowa State Dai-ly really helped, that was my learn-

ing background,” Gapstur said. “I got the opportunity to do up to three comics a day. It was great in learning the job experience.”

“He had a really good work eth-ic. It was because he was really pas-sionate about comics,” said Robert Josephson, manager of the store.

Gapstur also had some experi-ence working with the newspaper industry in the past.

“I tried three to four syndicates, but I was met with rejection,” Gap-stur said. “I have had an interview with Marvel Comics, which was a really great experience.”

Winning this contest would be a huge step forward for Gapstur’s cartoonist career.

“I would be able to get in the newspapers and get a develop-ment deal. I want to get paid to tell the story I want to tell,” Gapstur

said. Mayhem Collectibles is pro-

moting Gapstur’s involvement in the contest. The store posted flyers and it is promoting the event on its Facebook pages as well.

“We were always really im-pressed with his work, and it’s been great to see him grow,” Josephson said.

Voting for the contest ends Fri-day. Students can vote at Amazon.com.

By Rashah McChesneyDaily Staff Writer

The ISU Department of Public Safety isn’t sure how much money will be eliminated from its budget or whether it will be forced to elimi-nate staff members.

The police department at the University of Iowa is operating un-der a similar veil of uncertainty, but may be in a better position overall.

Jerry Stewart, director of ISU DPS, wrote in an e-mail that he has yet to receive a concrete figure for a reduction, but his department has been discussing ways to cope with further budgetary restrictions.

In an interview earlier this year, Stewart said de-spite budget cuts, his department hadn’t had to reduce the number of officers. Part of the costs for this year was offset by a grant the department received, which allowed it to operate without any major changes.

That grant, while helpful, will not keep the depart-ment from suffering under the latest round of budget cuts, ending with a mandate that every department on campus will have temporary layoffs or furloughs and reductions in their retirement contributions.

Warren Madden, vice president for business and finance, said public safety is a high priority and that he hopes the department will be able to time its tem-porary layoffs and furloughs in such a way that the campus community will feel minimal impact from a reduction in police staff.

Madden, whose office determines the budget for the Department of Public Safety, said he hasn’t re-ceived any firm reduction figures, but has participat-ed in conversations in which he can get “some idea” of what’s going to happen.

“I believe the provost’s office is getting close to be-ing able to tell us some solid figures,” he said. “As we’ve said in some of the earlier budget discussions, public safety is a high priority, and I’m hoping we can mini-mize the reductions.”

Madden said while the department may not be able to fill any of its vacant positions quickly, he hopes

see DPS on PAGE 8

By Jessie OpoienDaily Staff Writer

Eight years ago, Greta Johnson visited Wash-ington, D.C., on an eighth-grade school trip.

Johnson, senior in political science, discov-ered something during her first experience in the U.S. capital: a love for politics.

Johnson is wrapping up a semester in that hub of political activity, finishing an internship with Iowa Rep. Steve King.

“Everyone has this energy for politics and wanting to do good work for the country, and I just saw that, even as an eighth-grader,” John-son said. “It’s pretty surreal to look back … in eighth grade, I remember thinking, ‘I want to move back here at some point.”

Johnson has also experienced legislature at the state level, working as a page at Iowa’s state Capitol during her senior year of high school. As much as she loves Washington, D.C., Johnson’s heart is in Iowa.

“I’m very grateful for the experience I’ve had in D.C.,” Johnson said. “You will always wonder ‘what if I hadn’t done that?’ I’m looking forward to being back in Iowa, though. I don’t necessarily know what the future holds, but at this point I’d say I’m definitely more suited for being in Iowa.”

Although her internship will end soon, John-son’s college political career is far from over.

In October 2008, Johnson was appointed as the student representative on the Iowa Board of Regents. The position, which is given to a stu-dent from one of Iowa’s three regents universi-ties on a rotating basis, lasts until one year after the student graduates.

However, the position timeline is extended if the student enrolls in a regents university grad-uate program.

Former Government of the Student Body president Daniel Fischer supported Johnson’s nomination after working with her in GSB, hav-ing known her for most of his college career.

“She has a very positive and calm demean-or,” Fischer said. “I think she does a good job with thinking the issues through, and when [she has] to make a decision, staying calm and just doing the best that [she] can.”

Fischer said the most important part of Johnson’s approach to decisions related to budget cuts is that she has the student voice in mind.

“It’s … a daunting task when you look at the number of students I’m representing and the people I’m working with,” Johnson said, adding, “I’ve learned so much about each of the univer-sities and the special schools.”

Johnson said budget cuts have made her ex-perience “a lot more challenging” than she ever anticipated it would be.

“A lot of it hits home for me,” Johnson said. “I’m personally paying this tuition increase. Of course, it hits me more close to home than any of the other regents.”

Johnson said she is in a challenging position trying to find “a very hard balance.”

“I see the rationale of the universities in wanting to sustain the quality of education... but I also see the student perspective of not want-

Gapstur

Cast your vote:For a link to the voting site

and contest information iowastatedaily.com

online

™

Greta Johnson, junior in political science, is currently doing an internship in Washington, D.C. She will return at the end of the fall semester. File photo: Shing Kai Chan/Iowa State Daily

Bearinger

Madden

see JOHNSON on PAGE 8

Friday, November 6, 2009 >> Iowa State vs. Oklahoma State University at 2:30 p.m. Saturday >> an Iowa State Daily sports supplement

JeromeTiller

Austen

Arnaud

A tale of two quarterbacks

ISU footballCheck out Gridiron for extended coverage

see SPORTS on PAGE 4

Cyclones face Huskers with 11-game streak on the line.

Top-10 rematch

Editor’s note:This is the second story in a series about the effects of the budget cuts on the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences.

chanan County. Since ISU Extension was forced to give up $4.15 million from its budget, he was reassigned to Dubuque County, where he is the regional extension educational director for Dubuque, Delaware and Jackson counties.

“With the $4.1-million budget cut coming to extension, things had to change,” he said. “There were lots of feelings of anxiety and sadness over the loss of my work that I had done in the previous county, but also some excitement about the new possibilities in the new region that I’m in.”

He said he and his wife chose not to move from their home in Oelwein. Moving would mean forc-ing their daughter to attend a new middle school. For his wife, it would mean giving up a “good job” to search for something else.

Before the budget cuts, extension services cov-ered all 99 counties in Iowa.

Jack Payne, vice president for extension and outreach with ISU Extension, said extension con-sidered Iowa as 100 counties, splitting Pottawatta-mie County into two counties.

When the time came to reduce the extension’s budget, Payne was part of a committee that deter-mined how cuts would be made.

Prior to the cuts, there were 92 county exten-sion directors, some serving multiple counties.

Extension cut the staff of 92 directors, making 20 regions within the state. Regions are relatively the same in terms of population and property taxes, Payne said.

Of the 92, seven were hired immediately in jobs outside the extension, 10 were hired back within extension as field specialists, 21 were hired as regional directors and the director of field op-erations, and 37 of the 92 chose the Retirement Incentive Option.

Seventeen remain unemployed, although Payne said some are trying to secure jobs within their local county extension councils.

Payne said the cuts are a “huge loss to Iowa communities.”

It’s also been tough on morale, he said.“Extension is like family within the university,”

he said. “There’s been a big chunk of the family taken away.”

He said the cuts have force extension to re-evaluate ways in which it provides programming throughout the state.

Sherry Glenn, director of field operations with ISU Extension, was the central Iowa area director before the cuts. She said the ways in which pro-grams are distributed are likely to change.

Glenn, who oversees all 20 regions in the

state, said programs will likely be shared between counties and regions instead of allocating funds for each county to have its own programs. Web-based programming is likely, she said.

“While no one likes the budget cuts, we need to look at what new opportunities that opens up for us,” she said. “Sometimes, with reduced resources, you have to be more creative, more entrepreneur-ial, and we have a staff that’s able to do that.”

Payne said he’s worried about what Fiscal Year 2011 might mean for the extension.

“My hope is that the governor took a bigger mid-year cut than he had to,” he said. “It might soften the blow for FY2011.”

Payne said he’s hoping to handle the mid-year reversion without any additional job losses.

Budget cuts are difficult to deal with at the extension level because, unlike the university, ex-tension can’t raise tuition or propose a surcharge because it doesn’t deal with students, he said.

“FY2011 is looming in everyone’s minds and that doesn’t necessarily matter if you’re in exten-sion, or if you’re in any other state-funded type of position or agency,” said Matthew Deppe, regional extension educational director for Region 18, a nine-county region in southern Iowa.

Previously, Deppe was the extension educa-tional director in Madison County.

Deppe said the transition has been fairly smooth.

“I think one of the challenges, any time you change employment or job descriptions, is trying to move forward,” he said.

He said constant communication is impor-tant, as well as answering one key question: “How do we provide our mission and service with fewer people?”

Bearinger said he’ll remain “cautiously opti-mistic” in the meantime.

“I want to do the job I’ve set out to do and con-tinue to do that job to the best of my ability,” he said. “There’s really nothing else you can do.”

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8 | NEWS | Iowa State Daily | Friday, November 6, 2009 Editors Dylan Boyle, Sarah Haas and Allison Suesse | news@iowastatedaily.com | 515.294.2003

fessor of English.The classes that are not of-

fered in the traditional manner will be part of the pilot program.

One of the classes involved in the pilot program is consid-ered to be a hybrid class.

Kostelnick said these types of classes will involve both face-to-face and online instruction throughout the semester.

Blakely said both English 150 and 250 classes will be of-fered in this format.

Another part of the program involves having a theme for the English 250 class, which will be chosen by the faculty member teaching the class.

That faculty member will team up with one or two teach-ing assistants whose areas of graduate study relate to the theme of the class.

The two or three sections of classes will be taught separately, but with the same syllabus.

“That’s really exciting that faculty will be collaborating with [teaching assistants] who will share a common syllabus and [they] will be teaching material that is directly relevant to their programs of study as graduate students,” Kostelnick said.

These themed classes will meet as a large group through-out the semester to discuss or listen to presentations.

Part of the pilot program involves collaboration among faculty in order to distribute the work load of their classes.

Kostelnick said this collabo-ration would include taking four sections of a class and condens-ing them into three as a way to share the responsibilities.

“As writing instructors, one of the things that all of us expe-rience is very intense periods of paper grading when students hand their papers in, some-times in multiple sections, and it’s a very intensive work load,” Kostelnick said. “This experi-ment will try to spread out that work load and responsibility for

the paper grading among the faculty who are teaching the course.”

Sharing class responsibilities will also allow more interaction among students and faculty in-volved in these classes.

Kostelnick said if this part of the program is continued in the future, it could help save money.

Making these changes is part of the way the English de-partment is handling a 14-per-cent cut to its budget.

“We’ve worked since last March to avoid having larger classes in English 150 and 250, and we’re resisting doing that,” Blakely said.

Throughout the semester, faculty and graduate students will assess the pilot program. Depending on how the pro-gram is evaluated, it will be de-termined if it is something that will be continued in the future.

“The whole idea is to try out new things and choose the best experiences from those and im-plement them more widely in the future,” Kostelnick said.

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EXTENSIONfrom PAGE 1

to keep the department at its current staff level.

“One of the things we don’t want to do is hire someone right now and find out that the next fiscal year is going to be challenge and there will have to be further reductions,” Madden said.

Chuck Green, director of public safety at the University of Iowa, said he has also not yet been informed of any cuts they will take next year.

“The book hasn’t been written on that yet,” he said. “But I know that right now, presently, we’re holding onto our budget for next semester.”

Green, whose office also

encompasses campus secu-rity and fire safety, said that while his departments’s bud-get for next semester was still secure, neither Iowa State nor the University of North-ern Iowa had yet determined whether it would be making further cuts.

Green, however, said, his department didn’t have much of a monetary buffer. He said he wasn’t sure if the depart-ment would be able to cope with further budget cuts with-out losing personnel.

“I think we’ve done a good job of money management last year, or maybe the year before we reduced the num-ber of security guards, but that’s our non-sworn person-nel, and they don’t have police power at all,” Green said. “We

didn’t have to furlough or let anybody go, and we’re still employing students, which is a very positive thing.”

Tom Moore, interim Uni-versity of Iowa spokesperson, said public safety is a high pri-ority on his campus and it was operating from the standpoint that the most beneficial thing for the economy would be for the university to keep people employed.

Moore said that while the University of Iowa has yet to impose furloughs or tem-porary layoffs on its depart-ments, it did have more than 400 faculty and staff positions open that had not been filled.

“Most of those people left through attrition, but we have not yet refilled their positions,” Green said.

DPSfrom PAGE 1

ing to pay more money year after year,” Johnson said.

Above all, Johnson said she recognizes that ISU students are “getting a great college educa-tion for a low price” compared to other states.

The philosophy behind Johnson’s decisions is to “make the best decisions as situations come about … [to] take it as it comes to you.”

Growing up on a farm in Le Mars, Johnson’s “typical Iowa childhood” makes agriculture a key issue for her.

Her broad experience has sustained the “strong passion for education” that comes with having a mother and sister who are teachers.

Of what keeps her grounded, Johnson said, “Number one is my faith. One of my favorite things about my week … no matter where I am … is going to church. Along with that is be-ing with my family and friends … Without that, I wouldn’t be able to be where I am today and stay … Greta Johnson — who I’ve always been.”

Jenon Katt, senior in journalism and mass communication, is one of Johnson’s closest friends.

Katt and Johnson, both members of the Al-pha Gamma Delta sorority, met during sorority recruitment as freshmen at Iowa State.

The two will be roommates when Johnson returns to Ames.

“We’ve been with each other through every-thing,” Katt said. “When she was a freshman, she was very serious. Everything had to be or-ganized … and I was more the opposite side of the spectrum … I’ve learned from her, and she’s learned from me a little bit.”

Katt said it’s “really fun” as a friend to watch Johnson’s successes, both personally and pro-fessionally. She added, “If there’s one thing that she’s really good at, it’s that … she takes all sides and listens to all people.”

Other students who have worked with her agree.

“It’s uplifting to have her around,” said Brian Kahler, senior in finance, who has served in sev-eral organizations with Johnson.

Johnson has a “motherly role about her,” Katt said, explaining, “She would make sure the couch was open if I wanted to take a nap … Hal-loween weekend, she makes sure her friends have cookies.”

Baking is one of Johnson’s favorite activities, something to which Katt can attest.

“Growing up on a farm, I think she has that natural ability. One Christmas, I was trying to make Oreo balls, and I ended up... crying in the kitchen. Then here comes Greta, and she came in and finished the Oreo balls and took care of it... She’ll just sweep in and take care of you,” Katt said.

“Greta is going to have a great career some-day,” Katt said, “but she’ll be a even better mom.” Katt said she and Johnson will remain friends “forever,” adding that she knows “she’ll baby-sit my kids someday.”

When Johnson isn’t busy on Capitol Hill or voting on budget issues, she finds time for en-tertainment.

“She loves ‘Jon and Kate Plus 8,’” Katt said. “She got all the seasons for Christmas … She’s definitely on Team Kate. She always loved Kate because Kate is very organized and runs her house on a schedule.”

Katt said while Johnson “has her planner” and “has everything mapped out,” she is also “laid back” and “fairly spontaneous.”

As a friend, Katt said she is proud of how Johnson has approached her role on the Board of Regents.

“It’s a huge honor that she gets to serve on the board, but she just looks at it as an opportu-nity to serve,” Katt said.

“She wants to learn more, and she knows that she can do something for the students at … all the universities in Iowa and the special schools.”

Katt added, “There are a lot of students on campus who don’t understand the decisions she has to make and what she has to go through in these meetings … I think that says a lot about her character and how she handles it.”

Johnson views the challenges of the board “as her duty,” and “as her friend … that’s some-thing you cant help but admire,” Katt said.

“We’re seniors, so we’re starting to think about the future … Greta just has a great view about those things,” Katt said. “It’s easy to get wrapped up in worrying about that. I am so ex-cited to see what Greta ends up doing, because I know opportunities will just come to her.”

Johnson reflected on her role model status: “It’s so funny to me to think … I’ve attained a certain degree of success. But to me, I’m just Greta. I’m no different from any other student.”

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Extension restructure

Before restructure: 92 directors

After restructure: 20 regional directors

■ 1 director of field operations ■ 37 chose the Retirement Incen-

tive Option ■ 10 field specialists ■ 7 employed outside of extension ■ 17 unemployed

Texas Shooting

Suspect uncovered By Lara Jakes and Pam HessAssociated Press Writers

WASHINGTON — The Army psychiatrist suspected of carrying a shooting rampage at Fort Hood, Texas, had come to the attention of authorities six months ago because of Internet postings that discussed bombings and other threats, law enforcement officials said Thursday.

The postings appeared to have been made by Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, who was wounded dur-ing the shootings at the Army post that killed 12 soldiers and wounded at least 30 others. The offi-cials say they are still trying to confirm that Hasan

was the author of the Internet postings. They say an official investigation was not opened.

One of the officials said Thursday that federal search warrants were being drawn up to autho-rize the seizure of Hasan’s computer.

The officials spoke on condition of anonym-ity because they were not authorized to discuss the case.

Retired Army Col. Terry Lee told Fox News that he worked with Hasan, who had hoped Obama would pull troops out of Afghanistan and Iraq. Lee said Hasan got into frequent argu-ments with war supporters, and had tried hard to prevent his pending deployment.