THE BROWN DAILY HERALDVolume CXLI, No. 39 An independent newspaper serving the Brown community since 1891 www.browndailyherald.com

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OPEN MIC TO OPEN WALLETS

Jacob Melrose / HeraldThe Hourglass Cafe hosted an open mic event to benefit the Children’s Cancer Society last night. Event organizer Brian McNary ’08, on stage (left), was among the performers.

From UChicago to Brown and backAfter ratcheting up research at Brown, Zimmer will re-turn to research giant UChicagoBY ERIC BECKNEWS EDITOR

As Brown’s chief academic officer since 2002, Provost Robert Zimmer has worked to mold Brown, traditionally seen as a liberal arts-focused institution, into a stronger research university. When he becomes the president of the University of Chicago July 1, he will take the helm of an institution that has long been known for its emphasis on research and gradu-ate schools.

Zimmer spent over two decades as a professor of mathematics and administra-tor at UChicago prior to becoming Brown’s provost. While at UChicago, he served as chair of the mathematics department, deputy provost and vice president for re-search and the Argonne National Labora-tory, which the university has operated for the U.S. Department of Energy since 1946.

Professor of Cognitive and Linguistic Sciences Kathryn Spoehr, who previously

served as Brown’s provost and dean of the faculty, said Zimmer’s positions at UChicago shaped his four years as Brown’s provost.

“He is very clear-ly focused on re-search, almost to the exclusion of the undergraduate ex-perience. This re-flects his University of Chicago back-ground. … He fo-cused on research here because he was in charge of research at Chicago,” Spoehr said, explaining that administra-tors tend to be “acculturated to a certain view of what academics is really about.”

No date set for online course registrationAdmissions, financial aid offices to implement Banner later this year

BY SIMMI AUJLASENIOR STAFF WRITER

The third floor of University Hall may one day become a foreign land to stu-dents — but not any time soon.

Three years after the University be-gan the process of implementing Banner — a comprehensive program that will replace systems and databases used for admissions, financial aid and course reg-istration — administrators cannot spec-ify a launch date for the highly-antici-pated online registration system. They do know that the process will take a long time, said Associate Provost Nancy Dun-bar and Ellen Waite-Franzen, vice pres-ident for Computing and Information Services.

The Office of Admission and the Of-fice of Financial Aid will begin using Banner in late September and late Octo-ber of 2006, respectively, Dunbar said.

But plans for using Banner for course registration remain less clear.

“(Online) registration is going to be there after (the Office of Admission and the Office of Financial Aid start using Banner), but we don’t have an absolute idea when,” Dunbar said.

Last semester, the organization of those in charge of the project changed. Now, Dunbar leads an administrative group that is taking on more work re-lated to the project. The University hired David Whiting, a consultant from the Columbia, S.C.-based consulting and training firm Cornelius and Associates, who began overseeing the day-to-day aspects of implementation two weeks ago. Dunbar described Whiting as “an experienced enterprise system director” who will ensure employees in all depart-ments meet deadlines and will help pre-vent the University from getting behind schedule.

When administrators decided to bring Banner to Brown in early 2003, they ex-pected online course registration to be ready in the spring of 2005. In October of

2004, The Herald reported that the Uni-versity was pushing the launch date back to spring of 2006. Last semester, after ad-ministrators announced that the time-line in place did not take into account several factors that would delay a launch of the online registration system, Waite-Franzen tentatively told The Herald stu-dents would be able to register for their courses online in the spring of 2007.

The Office of the Registrar currently uses a system that is over 20 years old, Waite-Franzen said. Banner will replace that system and 10 others, including the Brown Online Course Announcement.

“Some of the systems (that Banner

BY MELANIE DUCHSENIOR STAFF WRITER

Speaking yesterday at an all-day confer-ence called “Anti-War Patriotism,” Provi-dence Journal columnist Bob Kerr said the Iraq war has an “awful lot of similari-ties with Vietnam” and claimed the U.S. government uses embedded journalists to “control the coverage” of the war. Kerr, who was joined on a discussion panel by two veterans of the Iraq war and two family members of military men killed in Iraq, also urged audience members to support returning veterans.

The panel was the closing event of the conference, which was held in the List Art Building.

After five panel members related per-sonal stories for 90 minutes, an hour-long debate developed that pitted the panel and several audience members against future Marine Evan Pettyjohn ’06, who expressed adamantly pro-war views.

All the panel members called for the return of American troops and withdraw-

al from Iraq as well as laid out their rea-sons for opposing the war.

Andrew Sapp, a 49-year-old veteran and high school English teacher from Massachusetts, originally left the mili-tary to attend community college and Yale and Harvard universities on the GI Bill. After he ran into financial difficul-ty, he rejoined just before the Iraq war began.

“When (the government) started mak-ing a case for war and pretending to play diplomacy to try to avoid it, I knew they were already drawing up battle plans. They were already amassing troops to get overseas for the invasion,” he said.

Upon his return from Iraq, Sapp said he was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. Since then, he said his family has had its “life really taken away from us.”

Sapp emphasized that his story is not unique, saying many returning veterans will experience dependency on drugs and alcohol and deal with depression.

He added, however, that he hopes the

sacrifice he made was “worth it” and that Americans will take back their country from the “petty little men” who “mort-gaged our grandchildren” to pay for the war.

Patrick Resta, another veteran who served as a medic in Iraq for just under a year, expressed similar anti-Bush admin-istration sentiments, calling the handling of the war a “gross negligence and crimi-nal incompetence.”

He described permanent military bas-es he saw in Iraq, which he said had Pizza Huts, indoor swimming pools, million-dollar gyms and outlets selling iPods and televisions. Resta cited this as evidence that the United States has no immediate plans to leave Iraq.

“There is no exit strategy because leaving was never a part of the plan,” he said. “Once I got there, I realized quickly that we had no real mission.”

He added he was ordered “not to treat Iraqi people unless they were about to

Three years after Iraq war began, veterans and others discuss ‘anti-war patriotism’

see ANTI-WAR, page 4

see BANNER, page 7

Keeping an eye on U. HallRecent alums establish ‘watchdog’ for intellectual diversityBY MARY-CATHERINE LADERFEATURES EDITOR

There is a Foundation for Intellectual Di-versity at Brown University, though few

students and even fewer fac-ulty or administrators are likely to have heard of it. Five

recent alums who were involved in con-servative political groups as undergradu-ates founded the organization to promote underrepresented ideas by funding a vari-ety of on-campus activities.

Stephen Beale ’04, who chairs the group’s board of directors, said no ad-ministrators or faculty were made aware of the Foundation for Intellectual Di-versity, which is unaffiliated with the University. Though the group’s Web site prominently displays a picture of Uni-

versity Hall and describes itself as the “Foundation for Intellectual Diversity at Brown University,” Beale said these fea-tures are largely “aesthetic.”

Beale and the other board members — Travis Rowley ’02, Eric Neuman ’04, Joseph Lisska ’04, local radio host Brian Bishop and Christopher McAuliffe ’05 — hope to raise money from conservative alums and fund on-campus lectures that would counterbalance the “fact the Uni-versity has become so politicized,” McAu-liffe said.

Though the group only gained tax-ex-empt status recently and has yet to begin fundraising, much less bring a speaker to Brown, Beale said it has already received $15,000 in pledged donations. “There are

www.brown.eduProvost Robert Zimmer will become president of the University of Chicago.

FEATURE

see DIVERSITY, page 6

see ZIMMER, page 4

TAPPED OUTNo keg stands will be seen on the first-year substance-free floors in Perkins and Emery halls CAMPUS NEWS 5

REBUILDING BRUNOThree teams rely on the strength of their younger players to fill gaps left in last year’s lineups SPORTS 12

HARVARD’S HUNTFour candidates for Harvard’s top spot say they aren’t interested, but still no com-ment from President Ruth Simmons

CAMPUS WATCH 3

C R O S S W O R D

THIS MORNINGTHE BROWN DAILY HERALD · WEDNESDAY, MARCH 22, 2006 · PAGE 2

Jero Matt Vascellaro

Chocolate Covered Cotton Mark Brinker

M for Massive Yifan Luo

Homebodies Mirele Davis

Freeze Dried Puppies Cara FitzGibbon

Silentpenny Soundbite Brian Elig

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Justin Elliott, Vice President

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ACROSS1 Pot filler5 Visit

11 It has its ups anddowns

14 “__ there, donethat”

15 Fruit orvegetable,depending onwhom you ask

16 “__ Flew Overthe Cuckoo’sNest”

17 Part of COLA18 Saws19 Olympics chant20 “The Fantasticks”

classic23 Indy 500 letters25 CIA precursor26 Harbor protection27 __-toity29 Filming session32 General guideline35 Reagan era prog.38 Kind of collar39 Lord, or his

subject40 Loads41 Apr.-to-Oct.

setting42 Make a personal

discovery?44 Bell ringers45 Really enjoy46 Grammy-winning

British guitaristJulian

49 Contemptuoussound

51 Big period52 Actor in “Beverly

Hills Cop” films57 “__ to Joy”58 Land by the River

Shribble59 Chaplin’s wife62 Dream indicator63 Like

scrapbooking64 Squeeze65 Heston was its

pres.66 Talks back to67 Tough fiber

DOWN1 “Lost” airer2 Prefix with -lithic

3 Aerospacecompanyemployee

4 __’acte5 RBI and ERA6 Melees7 Epps of “House”8 One running for

Congress?9 Newsy bit

10 Rhinoplasty11 Have

reservations12 Commencement13 Spent21 It has its ups

and downs22 Brave rival?23 Cover one’s

tracks, in a way24 Sells tips28 Half a score29 Hoe holders30 Sci-fi award31 Sign33 Wilson who

playedGeraldine

34 Pointy part35 “On the

Waterfront”extra

36 Grief37 Red beginning40 Red-beet link42 Provokes43 Old Sinclair rival44 Disreputable

paper46 Rival of Ilie and

Jimmy47 Less civil48 Plant swelling49 Rudely sarcastic

50 Revolutionaryrebel Daniel

53 __ avis54 “__ Tu”: 1974

hit55 Roadside stops56 Laddie’s

vacation spot60 “Apocalpyse

Now” setting,briefly

61 Rock blaster

By Jack McInturff(c)2006 Tribune Media Services, Inc.

3/22/06

3/22/06

ANSWER TO PREVIOUS PUZZLE:

RELEASE DATE– Wednesday, March 22, 2006

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

xwordeditor@aol.com

“GENOMIC APPROACHES TO UNDERSTANDING THE GENETIC BASIS OF HUMAN DISEASE”12 p.m., (CIT 368) — Benjamin Raphael of the University of California, San Diego will deliver a lecture.

“SUGGESTION REDUCES CONFLICT IN THE HUMAN BRAIN: CONVERGING NEUROIMAGING ACCOUNTS”4 p.m., (Hunter Lab 206) — Amir Raz of Columbia University will give this Michael S. Goodman ‘74 Memorial Lecture.

“EMPOWERMENT, ACTIVISM AND ENGAGEMENT IN THE SOUTH ASIAN CONTEXT”5:30 p.m. , (Third World Center) — Shamita Das Das Gupta of New York University Law School will speak about her activism and research in the areas of domestic violence and cultural diversity.

FIGHT FOR SAME-SEX MARRIAGE8 p.m. , (Salomon 203) — Queer Alliance’s Queer Political Action Committee will discuss the same-sex marriage struggle and the battle for equality.

T O D A Y ’ S E V E N T S

M E N U

SHARPE REFECTORY

LUNCH — Beef and Broccoli Szechwan, Sticky Rice with Edamame Beans, Polynesian Ratatouille, Paprika PotatoesGrilled Breakfast Ham, Cappucino Brownies, Raspberry Sticks

DINNER — Spring Round-Up Dinner Special

VERNEY-WOOLLEY DINING HALL

LUNCH — Vegetarian Squash Bisque, Turkey and Wild Rice Soup, Chicken Pot Pie, Pizza Rustica, Vegan Tomato Rice Pilaf, Fresh Sliced Carrots, Cappuccino Brownies

DINNER — Spring Round-Up Dinner Special

3 more days ‘til freedom

(sorry, thesis writers...)

CAMPUS WATCHTHE BROWN DAILY HERALD · WEDNESDAY, MARCH 22, 2006 · PAGE 3

Eight top schools to provide support for community college transfer studentsBY KRISTINA KELLEHERSTAFF WRITER

Eight highly selective colleges and universities — includ-ing Cornell University — are teaming up with a nonprofit foundation to invest $27 million to improve opportuni-ties for community college students to attend four-year colleges.

With the aid of a $7 million grant from the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation, the eight participating schools are providing $20 million of their own money to create pro-grams to recruit some of the 6.5 million students who at-tend community colleges nationwide, according to a press release from the Cooke Foundation. Community college students make up 45 percent of college undergraduates in the country.

The Cooke Foundation sought proposals for such support programs from the nation’s 127 most selective colleges and universities, said Pete Mackey, a spokes-man for the Cooke foundation. Forty-eight institu-tions submitted proposals, and the eight selected were Amherst College, Bucknell University, Cornell, Mount Holyoke College, the University of California, Berke-ley, the University of Michigan, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the University of Southern California.

Mackey declined to name the other schools that sub-mitted proposals and would not say if Brown applied.

The eight contributing schools are expected to enroll 1,100 new community college transfer students from low- to moderate-income backgrounds, provide another 2,100 community college students with information about four-year schools and instructional services and partner with 50 community colleges to build and improve transfer programs, according to a March 6 press release from the Cooke Foundation.

In selecting the grant recipients, the foundation’s staff looked for schools that have already proven a commit-ment to providing support to low-income students and community college transfers. Staff members also tried to identify schools that would be able and willing to sustain the program after the grant money was exhausted. The foundation’s grant is expected to last four years.

While many colleges and universities have recently fo-

cused on recruiting students from lower socioeconomic levels, these programs “typically focus recruitment and fi-nancial aid on high school graduates,” Mackey said, not-ing in particular programs in place at Harvard and Yale universities.

Many, including Kurt Thiede, vice president for enroll-ment management and communications at Bucknell, be-lieve community college students are discouraged from transferring to four-year institutions because of the lack of available financial aid.

“I believe community college students have (previ-ously) had admissions access to Bucknell similar to that of other transfers. However, I don’t believe they have had consistent access to financial aid, which would have made enrollment more possible to most of them,” Thiede said.

Amherst has many programs that recruit disadvantaged high school graduates, but the college has not done much previously to reach out to community college students.

“For a lot of students from disadvantaged back-grounds attending community colleges, sometimes largely for financial reasons, there is a perception that transferring to a place like Amherst or Brown simply isn’t an obtainable goal, academically or financially,” said Darren Reaume, Amherst’s coordinator of admis-sions outreach. “Because we haven’t done much out-reach to community colleges, I think we haven’t been on the radar for students looking to transfer.”

Amherst’s proposed program has two goals: to increase and improve outreach and recruitment strategies and to ease the transition to campus for community college transfers.

While Amherst currently lacks a community college outreach program, at least one other school funded by the Cooke Foundation’s grant is building upon already estab-lished connections to community colleges.

Prior to this recent partnership, Bucknell had already utilized transfer enrollments to “top off” its enrollment numbers. But financial aid for transfer students ebbed and flowed, not allowing Bucknell to enroll a consistent number of transfer students and low-income transfer stu-dents on an annual basis, Thiede said.

“Our partnership with the Community College of Phil-adelphia was called STEP (Student Transfer Enrichment

College RoundupFour top candidates for Harvard presidency say they are not interested in the job

Four highly regarded candidates to replace Lawrence Summers as the next president of Harvard University have said they have no interest in the position.

University of Pennsylvania President Amy Gutmann, Columbia University President Lee Bollinger and Tufts University President Lawrence Bacow have told student newspapers at their universities that they are content with their current positions and have no intentions of leaving for Harvard. Nannerl Keohane, former president of Wellesley College and Duke University, said in a March 16 Boston Globe article that she also has no interest in Harvard’s presidency.

The four leaders mentioned above have been named as top candidates for the Harvard post by publications includ-ing the Globe and the Chronicle of Higher Education.

But another frequently mentioned candidate has not made a statement about her interest in the Har-vard spot. Since Summers resigned, the office of Brown President Ruth Simmons has declined to answer any questions regarding Simmons’ intentions. After de-clining to comment to The Herald about “the situation

at Harvard” in an e-mail earlier this month, a Univer-sity spokesman released a statement to the Globe last week: “The president’s office declines to comment on any speculation about leadership issues that are taking place at Harvard.”

Cornell student dies during visit to the University of VirginiaPolice are investigating the death of a Cornell Univer-

sity freshman who died while visiting a friend at the Uni-versity of Virginia over spring break.

Matthew Pearlstone was found lifeless in a bed on the morning of March 17, according to Associated Press re-ports. Authorities said that there was no evidence of foul play, and the cause of death has yet to be determined.

Howard Pearlstone, Matthew’s grandfather, told the AP that his grandson had been “partying” the night before he died.

“He went to sleep and never woke up,” Howard Pearlstone said. “The whole thing is beyond my comprehension.”

Memorial services for Pearlstone were to be held when Cornell students return from spring break this week.

—Stu Woo

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BY JUSTIN AMOAHSTAFF WRITER

Amherst College President Tony Marx has set in mo-tion an initiative to attract lower-income students whose annual family income is less than $40,000.

Amherst has practiced race-conscious admis-sions practices for approximately 40 years, but the college is now looking to be more mindful of class during the recruitment and admissions process. Administrators at Amherst hope this initiative will prompt other elite colleges and universities to fol-low suit.

The college plans to expand its total enrollment by admitting approximately 30 more students each year. Of those 30 additional students, administra-tors project 10 to 12 will be from the low-income quartile. Currently, 16 percent of Amherst students are recipients of Federal Pell Grants.

Part of Amherst’s initiative is designed to lessen the disparity in higher education between the low-er and upper class. According to the Century Foun-dation, a New York City-based public policy think tank, just 3 percent of students from the 146 most selective colleges in the nation comes from the lowest socioeconomic quartile, while 74 percent is from the top quartile.

“I really do believe, as does our president, that we have an absolutely ironclad moral responsi-bility to be teaching a broader range of socioeco-nomic backgrounds than we currently are,” said Thomas Parker, dean of admissions and financial aid at Amherst.

Although there have been concerns that admit-ting more lower-income students would jeopardize academic standards, Parker said the college’s new initiative will be implemented without lowering these standards.

Parker said the initiative aims to actively recruit first-generation college and low-income students in order to foster a more diverse student body. “Low-income kids have been a forgotten constituency in selective colleges,” he said.

Geoffrey Woglom, an economics professor at Am-herst, said he believes the new initiative will not lead the college to admit under-qualified applicants.

“A lot of the kids who are ready to move very quickly come from prep schools and really high-quality public high schools. Some of the kids who are not quite ready to do that come from much less advantageous schools,” he said.

Woglom said the needs of these students cannot always be met in the same classroom, and that the economics department at Amherst has created ad-vanced sections for those students ready for more intensive work and intermediate sections for stu-dents who want more detail-oriented instruction.

Parker said this practice does not create a divide between students. “It’s not as if they are unable to do the work academically; they are doing superb academically and they’re not alienated,” he said.

In an e-mail to The Herald, Michael Simmons, who is from a lower-income family and is presi-dent of the student government at Amherst, wrote,

Amherst opens arms to low-income students

see AMHERST, page 4

see TRANSFERS, page 4

PAGE 4 THE BROWN DAILY HERALD WEDNESDAY, MARCH 22, 2006

Solution, tips and computer program at www.sudoku.com.

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

“I cannot detect any palpable divides along income lines. Our problem, like that at so many other colleges and universities, is that kids clique. And unfor-tunately, sometimes that cliqu-ing can happen based on back-ground.”

Simmons also wrote that this initiative would not sacrifice the college’s academic prestige.

“Not only will more young people get a top flight education, but Amherst College de-elitifies itself while continuing to offer elite education,” Simmons wrote. “By incorporating more econom-ic diversity within the student body, we give Amherst a more cosmopolitan dimension, which benefits the entire campus. I can-not think of a single reason not to support (Marx’s) plan.”

The biggest challenge in in-creasing the number of low-in-come students lies in recruit-ment, Parker said, because there aren’t the same tools in place to recruit low-income students as there are to recruit students from diverse racial and cultural back-grounds. “We can spend a week in New York visiting high schools and talk to a significant amount of black, Latino and Asian-Amer-ican students, but low-income

students are much more scat-tered,” he said.

One tool Parker would like to use is currently prohibited. About 20 years ago, colleges could target and contact low-income students by mail, but when schools started to use family income to exclude stu-dents rather than to include them, the College Board barred schools from having knowledge of a student’s family income, Parker said.

Parker said that if the Col-lege Board would allow schools to write directly to low-income students and talk about their loans, scholarships and grants, then a lot of students who would never be thinking about schools like Amherst and Brown would start seeing these institutions as possibilities.

Parker said the success of the initiative is contingent upon the quality of a student’s grade and secondary school education.

“K-12 is in desperate need, particularly for lower-income kids,” he said. “I think that there are plenty of low-income kids that are very talented and who would benefit tremendously from a Brown or an Amherst, we just have to identify them.”

“Part of the reason why a place like Brown or Amherst needs to be racially and socioeconomical-ly diverse is that these are folks that go into leadership positions

in their communities and are much more likely to say, ‘Look, education is so crucial that all schools need to be good, not only the schools in affluent sub-urbs or public schools,’” Parker added.

Brenda Allen, Brown’s associ-ate provost and director of insti-tutional diversity, said despite a divide between economic class-es, “education is the best equaliz-er of the human experience.” She added that high-quality education should be available to all classes.

“The circumstances that you’re born in do not determine your ability to contribute to an intel-lectual environment,” Allen said, adding that when low-income and high-income students interact, there are “profoundly positive” ef-fects because they help to elimi-nate class stereotypes that per-vade society.

Allen said admissions officers try to present Brown to all eco-nomic classes by annually visit-ing many large inner city and ru-ral high schools.

Allen said policies like need-blind admissions help to evalu-ate students regardless of class and resources. She cited the Sid-ney E. Frank Endowed Scholar-ship Fund, which provides cer-tain undergraduates with full scholarships, as an example of a program that provides signifi-cant assistance for the neediest undergraduate students.

Amherstcontinued from page 3

Program),” Thiede added. “This was a summer program that provided a six-week academ-ic experience for 20 to 30 CCP students on the Bucknell cam-pus. In any given year, after the STEP experience, three to six students indicated an interest in enrolling at Bucknell the fol-lowing year.”

Bucknell has taken a hiatus from STEP for the past two sum-mers to revise the program so the partner relationship could be offered to more community colleges. The proposal to part-ner with the Cooke Foundation “could not have come at a bet-ter time,” Thiede said.

Bucknell’s partnership with the Cooke Foundation in-cludes five partner commu-

nity colleges that will identi-fy individual students for the program. Students in the pro-gram will be matched up with a faculty mentor and peer mentor from Bucknell. Trips to the Bucknell campus will be planned during the school year so the community col-lege students can gain a better sense of the community into which they will enter. A sum-mer program will be available to these students between their first and second years at the community college.

“We anticipate enrolling at least 15 students annually be-ginning in the fall of 2007,” Thiede said. “Over the four-year period of the grant, the Cooke Foundation will com-mit $806,400 for operations. Bucknell will commit $416,300 for operations and at least $1,677,300 in new scholarship funds.”

Transferscontinued from page 3

die” and only if an injury was caused by U.S. troops.

Dante Zappala, whose bro-ther died in an explosion in Iraq, agreed with the view of Resta and Sapp that the Bush administration has been lying to the American public.

“The thing that is still miss-ing to me right now is truth,” he said. “We all have to be invested in what’s happening. It is vital as a country that we are.”

Stephanie Kern, who lost a son to an improvised explosive device in Iraq, called for jour-nalists to report the truth.

“We need real journalists; we need to teach the young jour-nalists who are getting their ed-ucation now not to be afraid,” she said.

Resta added he had not spo-ken to a journalist while in Iraq because journalists were only allowed to speak to “pre-picked soldiers.”

Kerr echoed the sentiment, saying that embedding journal-ists was “genius on the part of the government” because it al-lowed governmental control of the media.

Although the audience large-ly expressed support for the

panelists, at least one member of the audience — Pettyjohn — disagreed. Pettyjohn, who is president of the College Repub-licans and will receive his Ma-rine Corps commission at Com-mencement in May, challenged the panelists to explain why so many people in the military be-lieves in the war.

He told The Herald that al-though he appreciated the pan-elists’ appearance on campus, he said he believed “they paint a one-sided picture.”

Carl Sheeler, a Marine vet-eran who is running for U.S. Senate, spoke at the conference earlier in the day and stayed to attend the panel discussion. During the question-and-an-swer session, Sheeler and sev-eral other veterans in the audi-ence encouraged Pettyjohn to rethink his positions on the war and debated with him about his views.

Sheeler told The Herald he believes Pettyjohn was display-ing “naiveté” but added, “Twen-ty-five years ago, I probably would have felt he same way.”

Catherine Lutz, professor of anthropology and moderator of the panel, ended the lengthy discussion by praising the pan-elists for speaking out at a time when many Americans display “violent” opposition to their views.

Anti-warcontinued from page 1

During Zimmer’s tenure as provost, the balance between the undergraduate College and graduate and biomedical initia-tives has “swung way out of line,” Spoehr said.

Zimmer acknowledged that UChicago is a “larger and more complex organization” than Brown and has a different cul-ture. UChicago has a multitude of graduate and profession-al schools and a greater focus on research. Its undergraduate curriculum features a strict core curriculum, while Brown shuns a core curriculum and distribu-tion requirements.

“If you look at any pair of uni-versities, you’re going to find some differences in culture and differences in the way they think about things,” Zimmer said. “While there are always differ-ences, the job of a university ad-ministrator and leader is to build on the strengths of the particu-lar university and on the partic-ular cultural climate that the in-stitution has. I tried to do that at Brown, and I’ll try to do it in a very different way at Chicago.”

In his nearly four years at Brown, Zimmer has managed the implementation of many of the initiatives of the Plan for Ac-ademic Enrichment and signifi-cantly ratcheted up the Universi-ty’s focus on research.

In a March 9 campus-wide e-mail announcing Zimmer’s departure, President Ruth Sim-mons cited his leadership in ex-panding the faculty and launch-ing multidisciplinary programs such as the Environmental Change Initiative, the Initia-

tive in Spatial Structures in the Social Sciences, the Center for Computational Molecular Bi-ology and the Cogut Center for the Humanities.

“The most important thing I really wanted to help achieve was to increase the level of ambition that Brown had about academic programs. … I think that’s been manifested in many ways. It’s quite satisfying,” Zimmer said.

Even after almost four years at Brown, Zimmer retains a deep con-nection to UChicago. “It’s an insti-tution I spent many years at, so I know it well and of course have a significant emotional attachment to it,” he told The Herald.

‘Stepping stone’ to a presidencyZimmer’s appointment as

UChicago’s next president was not surprising, said Stephen Nel-son, an associate professor of ed-ucational leadership at Bridge-water State College and the au-thor of a book titled “Leaders in the Crucible: The Moral Voice of College Presidents.”

“Provostships at places like Brown usually end up being step-ping stones to university presi-dencies or to bigger provostships which themselves are stepping stones to presidencies,” Nelson said. “For Zimmer to go back to where he was before — or to any-where else — as president is not surprising.”

“Even though people would have loved to see him stay longer, everybody knows that when you get to that level, provosts often serve a very brief time because of their profile. There’s no better preparation ground for a presi-dency than getting to a provost-ship,” he said.

Deputy Provost Vincent Tompkins ’84 said, “It was a sur-prise to me, but it wasn’t a sur-

prise in the sense of his accom-plishments as a scholar, as a uni-versity administrator and giv-en his deep familiarity with the University of Chicago.”

Nelson said many presidential search committees consider pro-vosts since they are typically the top day-to-day decision-mak-ers at universities, implementing plans and achieving goals set by the president.

Suggesting that the relation-ship between president and pro-vost could be considered akin to a “co-presidency,” Nelson said presidents tend to be highly vis-ible and focus on development and fundraising, while provosts work as “delegated decision-makers” to manage the academic functions of universities.

Tompkins said, “The president set the vision. The major things in the Plan for Academic Enrich-ment were things that the presi-dent developed, but the provost has been really crucial in imple-menting those.”

Presidential search commit-tees generally judge provosts based on the professors they have hired, programs they have implemented to attract and re-tain faculty, their management of the budget and their ability to attract financial support, Nelson said.

As the University’s second-in-command during a period of dra-matic change called for by Sim-mons and the Plan for Academic Enrichment, Zimmer was direct-ly involved in the key areas Nel-son said presidential search com-mittees generally consider.

Nelson said Zimmer’s career path — leaving an institution to gain experience elsewhere, only to return a few years later to take up a higher position — is not uncommon.

Zimmercontinued from page 1

www.browndailyherald.com

CAMPUS NEWSTHE BROWN DAILY HERALD · WEDNESDAY, MARCH 22, 2006 · PAGE 5

Kam Sripada / HeraldThe third floor of Emery is designated substance-free and provides a haven for first-years who want to avoid the college party atmosphere.

Independent concentrations may soon be on the rise, say IC Week organizersBY SPENCER TRICESTAFF WRITER

Organizers of this year’s “Inde-pendent Concentration Week,” which runs through Friday, spec-ulate that programming chang-es along with a recent on-cam-pus trend toward interdisciplin-ary studies in both medicine and digital media will draw more stu-dents to the week’s events.

On average, Brown graduates approximately seven indepen-dent concentrators a year, one of the smallest totals of any Univer-sity concentration.

Associate Dean of the College Carolyn Denard, who has over-seen the Independent Concen-tration Program since the fall of 2005, said she thinks “Indepen-dent Concentration Week” will serve to inform more students of the potentially rewarding aca-demic path.

“The problem is that many students do not know about (the program),” Denard said. In the future, she hopes the low num-ber of independent concentra-tors each year will not be attrib-uted to a general lack of knowl-edge regarding options within the program.

Tiffany Villa-Ignacio GS, a graduate proctor for the Inde-pendent Concentration Pro-gram, said the fact that inde-pendent concentrators need to demonstrate that their proposal does not fall under Brown’s ex-isting concentration offerings in order to secure approval might limit the number who complete such programs.

Shoshana Lavinghouse ’06, an independent concentrator, indicated that a lack of knowl-edge might deter students from pursuing independent concen-trations, but she added that the diversity of Brown’s standard concentrations might cause many students to find an exist-ing concentration that already covers their academic interest.

Still, Villa-Ignacio believes there is a growing trend of stu-dents developing interdisciplin-ary programs to cater to their specific interests.

“Merging interdisciplinary fields — for example bioethics — are be-ginning to show themselves in the Independent Concentration Pro-gram,” Villa-Ignacio said.

Such independent concentra-tions, Villa-Ignacio speculates, could eventually become stan-dard in five to 10 years.

Administrators and students within the Independent Con-

centration Program hope to raise student awareness through open discussions about possible op-tions within the program.

Independent concentrators will present their research and projects over the course of two roundtable lunches taking place today and Thursday. Four current and two tentatively approved indepen-dent concentrators will give pre-sentations on topics ranging from “Trauma Studies” to “Interactive Digital Media.”

In addition to attracting stu-dents interested in emerging inter-disciplinary fields, this year’s “In-dependent Concentration Week” organizers are hoping for a higher turnout due to format changes.

According to Lavinghouse, unlike previous years, this week’s programming is designed to be more invitational and accessible for students. Lavinghouse, who decided to pursue an indepen-dent concentration at the end of her first year, will be speaking at today’s meeting about her con-centration, which is titled “The Development of Science” and in-corporates science and history.

In the past, meetings and discussions devoted to the program were scheduled in the evening and were only cen-tered on the work of seniors. This year, members involved in the week hope casual lunch-time discussions featuring both juniors and seniors will draw more of an audience.

Reflecting on her own ex-periences completing an inde-pendent concentration, Laving-house said she perceives herself as “more able to talk about what I learned.” She added the expe-rience forced her to fully assess what she was doing at Brown.

For some students, realizing that an independent concentra-tion is not for them may be a re-warding experience in itself. “The fact that it’s an option makes you think about your education,” Vil-la-Ignacio said.

Works at best student art exhibit allow for personal interpretationsBY LYDIA GIDWITZCONTRIBUTING WRITER

The convergence of an artist’s in-tention and a viewer’s interpre-tation is central to this year’s ex-hibit of the best student artwork, located in the David Winton Bell

Gallery in List Art Center. Open to all members of the Brown community,

the exhibit showcases the talent of student artists representing an array of concentrations. Jurors Maureen O’Brien, the Rhode Is-land School of Design Museum curator of painting and sculp-ture, and Ron Hutt, an assistant professor of art and art history at the University of Rhode Island, selected the works included in the exhibition.

Although this year’s submis-sions were fairly homogenous in terms of medium — most pieces were two-dimensional — the themes and representations are incredibly diverse, said Jo-Ann Conklin, director of the Bell Gallery.

The installation by Madeleine Bailey ’06, “Catharsis,” grap-ples with concepts of identity through the intermingling of pig intestines and waxed thread on a white wall. Growing up in an Italian family, Bailey often made sausages with her grandmother using pig intestines as casings. In this piece, Bailey allowed the pig intestines — a unique medi-um familiar to her — to meander around the wall. The goal of the work is to express problems of

Substance-free, carefreeFirst-years in substance-free housing enjoy the communal atmosphere it provides

BY KAM SRIPADASTAFF WRITER

Some first-years come to Brown expecting the stereo-typical rowdy college experi-ence, but, for those incom-ing students seeking a sober lifestyle, the University pro-vides special substance-free housing.

According to the policy on the Office of Residential Life’s Web site, “residents in substance-free housing agree that they and their guests will not consume al-cohol or be under the in-fluence of alcohol or other substances while in the resi-dence hall.”

This year, approximate-ly 80 first-years are living in substance-free halls, located on the second floor of Per-kins Hall and the third floor of Emery Hall. Though these residences are “dry,” life on substance-free floors seems to provide everything its res-idents want.

“There’s always stuff to do,” said Dan Meltzer ’09, who lives on the second floor of Perkins. “We can be just as

crazy as other people.”The third floor of Em-

ery, designated as both sub-stance-free and all-female, is an environment that res-idents said suits their life-styles. “We usually just hang out or go to movies, and there are so many perfor-mances on campus,” said Michelle Snyder ’09, who lives on the third floor. “We can have fun without getting drunk every night.”

Both Meltzer and Snyder re-quested substance-free hous-ing on their housing appli-cations last summer, though Snyder was originally placed in Keeney Quadrangle. She filed for a room change last semster due to the “noise and the garbage trucks” of Keeney and was happy to find herself in substance-free housing the second time around.

In determining which

Where will you be on spring break?

see HOUSING, page 9

ARTS &CULTURE

see STUDENT ART, page 9

vast numbers of alums who are very disturbed over the direc-tion the University has taken in the past few years” and will not donate to the University, Beale said.

These alums are primar-ily former athletes or individu-als who graduated before 1960, said Beale, who is currently a reporter in New Hampshire. He added that he has met several of these discontented alums, one of whom, a class president from the 1950s, said the creation of the University Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice sparked a flood of angry phone calls from his former classmates.

Ronald Vanden Dorpel ’71, se-nior vice president for University advancement, said he had heard of neither the Foundation for In-tellectual Diversity nor the dis-gruntled alums the group hopes to tap for donations.

Vanden Dorpel said he is un-concerned about the group’s endeavors.

“Periodically, in Brown’s his-tory there have been groups set up, on the left and right and in between, that have proposed to solicit Brown alumni for other things, and I can’t recall any of them having a particularly long life or duration,” he said.

But Beale said longevity is the foundation’s purpose — it hopes to endow the Brown Spectator, the conservative publication Beale founded in 2002.

“I’m familiar with conserva-tive movements at other col-

leges and these movements are very short-lived,” Beale said. “We wanted to ensure that what we started lasted for the long term.”

Beale said he founded the Spectator in response to the controversy following The Her-ald’s publication in 2001 of an ad written by conservative com-mentator David Horowitz op-posing reparations for slavery. The event “made a great impres-sion on” the group’s board mem-bers, who were all students at the time, as they believed the Uni-versity suppressed free speech, McAuliffe said.

Beale said, “You cannot trust the administration, you cannot trust the faculty and you can-not trust the students to restrain themselves and preserve what I think should be an ideal academ-ic environment of free thinkers and academic freedom.”

“The foundation does not ex-ist to oppose the University, we hope to have a positive relation-ship with them,” Beale said. “But there will always be a need for an independent organization to act as a watchdog because the Uni-versity can get very carried away by itself.”

This fall, the group will bring its first speaker to Brown, and though the lecturer has yet to be determined, Beale said it would be a “big name.”

Beale said the group’s initial focus is on Brown, but he hopes it will eventually become a re-gional organization in south-eastern New England with an “indirect influence far beyond Rhode Island,” even soliciting donations from “other conser-vative databases.”

Despite its focus on conser-

vative donors and the conserva-tive make-up of the foundation’s board, Beale said the organiza-tion is non-partisan and not in-terested in promoting solely conservative ideas. Though none of its board members are politi-cally liberal, Beale said a few lib-erals are involved, but he did not specify in what capacity.

“We may all be conservatives, but there’s a lot of diversity and wide variety of opinion with-in our group,” Beale said. “Part of what we’re trying to do is get beyond the dichotomy of liberal versus conservative.”

McAuliffe and Beale suggest-ed speakers might range from writer Christopher Hitchens to pundit Andrew Sullivan. “I think when we start bringing speakers, people will see that we’re all over the place,” Beale said.

“We don’t want ideas just because they’re diverse because being diverse isn’t enough to qualify as being good,” McAu-liffe said, adding that the Foun-dation for Intellectual Diversity defines diversity in a broader sense than the politically cor-rect definition he thinks the University espouses.

Brenda Allen, associate pro-vost and director of institu-tional diversity, agreed that the group and the University have different definitions of diver-sity. Though she was not previ-ously aware of the foundation, Allen said its Web site suggested a narrower approach to diversi-ty than what her office seeks to address.

“It’s not a quest that’s incon-sistent with anything we’re trying to do,” Allen said of the group’s mission. “But out of this office

we define intellectual diversity in a much broader way.”

President Ruth Simmons’ Ka-leidoscope Fund for intellectual diversity, Allen said, represents this broader definition. “We don’t allow that fund to only include political diversity as intellectual diversity. It’s not just relegated to political things, just as we try to make clear that diversity is not just about race,” she said.

Beale and McAuliffe said the creation of the Kaleidoscope Fund was a step in the right di-rection. “Obviously it should be the beginning of a long process of reform,” Beale said, adding that the fund may have been cre-ated to “pre-empt” the Founda-tion for Intellectual Diversity.

McAuliffe said the Kaleidoscope Fund has made progress, but it “was a cheap way for the University to buy innocence on the intellectual diversity question.”

Marisa Quinn, assistant to the president, oversees the Kaleido-scope Fund and said its purpose is to fund speakers with diverse or controversial perspectives who might not otherwise find support to come to campus.

The fund, which consists of $100,000 taken from the pres-ident’s discretionary fund, has funded five speakers so far, but Quinn said its impact is hard to assess. Though the fund could be continued if it proves popular, Quinn said the existing money will last for some time.

Quinn said she was not famil-iar with the Foundation for Intel-lectual Diversity, but “the more groups there are dedicated to increasing intellectual diversity, the better we are as a campus community.”

The foundation’s initial goal may be to bring speakers, but Beale said it hopes to support the creation of a new curricular track of “Western civilization” courses, similar to the existing tracks of diversity perspectives and liber-al learning courses — tracks that Beale said have a “very shallow notion of diversity.”

Despite their discontent with the climate of political discus-sion at Brown, Beale and McAu-liffe said they enjoyed their time at the University and see their endeavor as a way to give back.

“We’re trying to find a way to give to a University that we like, not to undermine them,” McAu-liffe said. “This is just something above and beyond what Brown already offers.”

PAGE 6 THE BROWN DAILY HERALD WEDNESDAY, MARCH 22, 2006

Diversitycontinued from page 1

Disney to close unit devoted to Pixar sequelsBY CLAUDIA ELLER LOS ANGELES TIMES

The first casualty of Walt Dis-ney acquisition of Pixar Ani-mation Studios came Monday when the Burbank entertain-ment giant shuttered a com-puter animation unit created to make sequels to such Pixar hits as “Toy Story” and “Finding Nemo.”

Thirty-two employees, or nearly 20 percent of the 168 artists, production managers and support staff were told they would lose their jobs ef-fective May 26.

The remaining 136 will be absorbed into Disney’s feature animation division and rede-ployed to work on such pro-ductions as “Meet the Robin-sons,” “Rapunzel” and “Ameri-can Dog.”

In a statement, Disney con-firmed Monday’s developments with the Los Angeles Times and said it would help laid-off em-ployees find new work. At least half a dozen hired to work on “Toy Story 3” were foreigners working in the United States on visas.

Workers should find them-selves in demand, with comput-er animation enjoying a boom. Studios such as DreamWorks Animation, 20th Century Fox and Sony Pictures are poised to release a slew of digitally ani-mated movies this year.

Dubbed “Circle 7” after the Glendale, Calif., street where the unit sits, the sequels opera-tion was quietly set up last year by former Disney Chief Execu-tive Michael Eisner at a time when Disney’s lucrative part-nership with Pixar was strained and in danger of dissolving. Rivals derided the attempt to replicate Pixar’s unique creativ-ity, nicknaming the operation “Pixaren’t.”

Disney had the right to make Pixar sequels under its previous distribution agree-ment. Its decision irked Pixar executives, who worried that a botched effort would hurt their company’s reputation.

will replace) are very robust and healthy,” Dunbar said. “Others aren’t as good,” she added.

WebCT is one program Ban-ner will not replace, Dunbar said. WebCT will maintain its cur-rent functions and also facilitate Banner’s inputting of academ-ic records. Professors will enter students’ grades throughout the semester into WebCT, which will then transfer final grades into Banner. Students will also have the option of allowing their par-ents to view their grades online, Dunbar said.

Once online course registra-tion is set up through Banner, students’ academic records will be put into the database. Even-tually, students will have access to different types of records on Banner, including billing and fi-nancial aid information.

Online registration will pre-vent students from registering for courses for which they have not taken the prerequisites, Dunbar said. But she added that faculty will be able to override any re-strictions, and each department will make its own decisions re-garding prerequisites.

“There will be some experi-menting to decide what’s best,” Dunbar said, in reference to how the new system will handle prerequisites.

Banner implementation will cost the University over $20 mil-lion, Waite-Franzen said. The software itself will cost less than $1 million, she added. The larg-est cost is paying over 100 peo-ple to work on the project, she said. Other expenses include hardware, storage and a data-base license. The database li-cense alone will cost more than software consulting fees, Waite-Franzen said.

“We could easily have spent a lot more money,” she said.

Last semester, Harvard Uni-versity launched an online regis-tration system, making Brown the

only Ivy League school without some form of online registration.

The hundreds of universities that already employ Banner for online course registration sys-tems include Dartmouth Col-lege, Yale and Rice universi-ties and the College of William and Mary, Waite-Franzen said. Yale operates an older, more customized version of Banner, while Dartmouth, Rice and Wil-liam and Mary use newer ones, Waite-Franzen said. She added

that administrators she talked to at these schools were pleased with the program.

Jesse Silberberg, a fresh-man at Dartmouth, said Banner works well at his school. “I don’t really notice it that much,” he said.

The degree to which such a program registers in the mind of the student is a measure of its success, Dunbar said.

“It’s working the best when you don’t notice it,” she said.

BY MARLA CONELOS ANGELES TIMES

Despite two decades of cleaning up carcinogenic fumes from cars and factories, Californians are breathing some of the most toxic air in the nation, with residents of Los Angeles and Orange coun-ties exposed to a cancer risk about twice the national average.

A nationwide, county-by-county snapshot of the cancer threat posed by air pollution provides a troubling portrait of California, revealing that many potent chemicals still pose an excessive risk.

New York tops the U.S. Envi-ronmental Protection Agency’s list, followed closely by Califor-nia, while residents of the rural West, in Wyoming, South Dako-ta and Montana, have the least chance of contracting cancer from breathing the air.

One in every 15,000 Califor-nians — or 66 per million — is at

risk of contracting cancer from breathing the air over his or her lifetime, according to the EPA’s National-Scale Air Toxics As-sessment, which was released in February and based on emis-sions of 177 chemicals in 1999, the most recent data available.

In the Los Angeles area, the cancer threat is much higher, 93 per million in Los Angeles County — or one person in every 10,700 — and 79 per million in Orange County. The national av-erage is 41.5 per million: one in every 24,000 Americans. River-side and San Bernardino coun-ties are near the U.S. average.

Although a tiny fraction of all cancers in the United States are caused by chemicals, an array of air pollutants has been shown to cause lung cancer or leuke-mia in human and animal stud-ies. Some have been classified as known human carcinogens for 20 years or longer.

The biggest contributors, by

far, are cars, trucks and other mobile sources that burn gaso-line or diesel fuel.

Breathing chemicals is “one of the most significant environ-mental exposures” to cancer-causing agents for Californians, said Melanie Marty, chief of air toxicology and epidemiology at the California Office of Environ-mental Health Hazard Assess-ment. “People should under-stand that mobile sources have very large impacts on health. It’s not just asthma and heart dis-ease. It’s cancer too.”

A Los Angeles Times review of the national assessment as well as other, more up-to-date federal and state databases shows that the levels of most carcinogenic chemicals have declined substan-tially in California in recent years. Nevertheless, for at least 10 chem-icals, Californians are still exposed to higher cancer risks than the levels considered acceptable un-der government guidelines.

WORLD & NATIONTHE BROWN DAILY HERALD · WEDNESDAY, MARCH 22, 2006 · PAGE 7

Californians are still breathing dangerous levels of toxic air

A gift of glitz for New Orleans promBY AVIS THOMAS-LESTERWASHINGTON POST

WASHINGTON — Seventeen-year-old Marisa West was shop-ping for her prom dress last month when she started think-ing about the high school stu-dents in New Orleans who are still dealing with the devastation of Hurricane Katrina.

Would they be able to have their proms? she wondered. Would they have anything to wear?

Among the fancy dresses at the department store was born a campaign to collect 100 prom dresses and ship them south. Less than six weeks later, Marisa’s Prom Dresses for New Orleans had received more than 425 dresses, including one promised from a former Miss America.

“It hit me as I was shopping and remembering how much fun last year’s prom had been for me and my friends — how magical it had been to shop for the per-fect dress, find the perfect shoes and the perfect earrings, get the perfect hairstyle,” said Marisa, of suburban Beltsville, Md. “When I realized that thousands of girls in New Orleans wouldn’t have that this year, I wanted to try restore it for girls at one high school, if I could.”

The first step was finding a high school still planning a prom. From news reports, Marisa knew that many of the city’s schools remained closed. With the help of her mother, Leathia, the teen-ager began calling New Orleans schools.

At many, no one even an-swered. At others, no proms were planned. Finally, they made contact with a counselor at all-girls Cabrini High School, where more than half the stu-dents’ families lost everything in the hurricane. Cabrini’s prom is set for May 12.

“That’s when Marisa went into high gear,” said her moth-er, a social worker and ceramics teacher. Marisa set a deadline, which she has since extended to April 1 — plenty of time to col-lect the dresses and transport them south before prom night. She set up a Web site, arranged for a post office box and es-tablished drop-off spots in the Washington, D.C., and subur-ban Silver Spring, Md.

West, who was crowned Miss D.C. National Teenager in Oc-tober and also holds the title of Miss Teen Annapolis, began talk-ing up her campaign with her contacts on the pageant circuit. She and her mother kicked in the first 15 dresses.

“We’re real glamour girls, so we have stuffed closets,” said West, a senior at Georgetown Day School in Washington.

Two weeks after she started, she met her goal. A week later, she doubled it. Her classmates and teachers have contributed dozens of dresses. Miss Mary-land, Rachel Ellsworth, has sent a dress. A former Miss America, Heather French Henry, whom West met recently, promised to contribute.

Last week alone, more than 100 dresses came in. By the time Marisa closes shop, she could have 500, more than the racks set up in the guest room in her family’s home will hold.

“We’re going to have to move to FedEx Field or something to fit them all,” Leathia West said. “It has been heartwarming to see how people have responded.”

Judy Thompson, chairwom-an of Cabrini’s guidance de-partment, said the students are ecstatic about the effort. The school — founded by Frances Xavier Cabrini, the first Ameri-can citizen saint, and operated by the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus order — es-caped the destruction because it was on high ground. But many of its students lost everything.

“They didn’t evacuate with prom dresses,” Thompson said. “And even in the cases where their homes weren’t complete-ly destroyed, if you had a long prom dress hanging in the closet and got one foot of water, it was destroyed.”

When the shipment arrives in April, the girls of Cabrini will have plenty to choose from: fan-cy little black dresses, cocktail-length silk sheaths and elab-orately sequined, full-length gowns in every size from 2 to 2X. Somebody even donated a Vera Wang dress.

“It’s a simple little black dress with short sleeves — very re-spectable and gorgeous,” Marisa said, sounding like an announc-er at a fashion show.

Her favorite is a bubble-gum pink number she nicknamed “the Cupcake Dress.” “It basical-ly looks like a Cinderella dress. It has a tight bodice, and then it ex-plodes in tulle. If you are wearing it and you sit down, the skirt part doesn’t really sit down,” she said, laughing.

She has also collected acces-sories. An artist friend offered to pitch in 25 hand-painted hand-bags. Another artist will donate 100 pairs of earrings that she is making especially for the New Orleans students.

As her deadline nears, Marisa is worrying about the logistics of getting the dresses south.

Her family had planned to ship the 100, but now that 500 are expected, she is hoping that a freight company will pitch in. She is also trying to arrange to make the trip to meet the girls of Cabrini High.

“I would just love to see their faces as they try on the dresses,” she said. “I would love to go to their prom to see how beauti-ful they look and how wonderful they feel that night, despite ev-erything they’ve gone through.”

Thompson said she notified her students of Marisa’s program two weeks ago in an intercom announcement. The students were thrilled and hope to meet their benefactor. The school has about 200 juniors and seniors eligible to attend the prom and they’ll get first dibs, but young-er students might also be offered a dress to save for next year, Thompson said.

Bannercontinued from page 1

Texas, such as Brian Leetch.That said, things do need to

change for the red, white and blue. It isn’t the lack of win-ning that I’m concerned about. It’s our inability to even get to championship games anymore that bugs me. The very least we can do is to be in a position to win at international competi-tions, and so I present, to who-ever is in charge of assembling America’s teams, a list of sugges-tions for change.

For starters, don’t simply look for the best athletes that are available. As hackneyed as it sounds, look for the players and athletes that will best fit into the team concept. When Herb Brooks coached the men’s ice hockey team in the 1980 Olym-pics, this was the approach he used to assemble his team, and the rest is sports history. If you have a team on which each ath-lete fills a role that contributes to the team’s overall performance, that team will win much more often than it loses.

Regarding the disaster that was the 2004 Olympic men’s basket-

ball team, the United States had too many ball-hogging swingmen and no pass-first point guards or pure shooting guards. The 2006 Olympic men’s ice hockey team had several established veterans but no young, energetic talent. The team that represented the United States at the World Base-ball Classic had a bevy of studs in the bullpen but only two qual-ity starters: Jake Peavy and Rog-er Clemens. When you’re making a team for a world competition, make sure each team role neces-sary for success is filled.

Once a team is formed, it’s necessary to get them to play to-gether for at least a few months leading up to an internation-al event. Even if a team has all the right components to be suc-cessful, it’s not possible for all of them to be thrown togeth-er at the very last moment and form a cohesive unit. The best teams out there know them-selves inside and out. There’s an established rapport among coaches and players that comes about only through familiarity with one another, and this in-tra-team chemistry was lack-ing in all those aforementioned squads.

I am aware of all the argu-ments and excuses for the lack of familiarity in our most recent international outfits. The season ended too recently and the play-ers were burned out; the season hadn’t started yet; the players weren’t in midseason form; and this team was thrown togeth-er at the last minute. Frankly, if the athletes are tired of losing, they won’t mind making a few sacrifices. If it means giving up downtime during the offseason, so be it. If it means finding ath-letes at either the college or mi-nor league level who are willing to put in more of a commitment to the team’s formation, so be it. Teams win because they’re great teams, not because they have the best collection of talent.

The final suggestion for get-ting America’s international mojo back is probably the most ideal-istic, hard-to-achieve solution of them all: toning down the predic-tions and media coverage so that the weight of expectations doesn’t get to the heads of the athletes. It’s idealistic because even with its re-cent struggles, the United States will always be expected to win any world competition it enters as dictated by its “winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing” mindset. It’s hard to achieve be-cause we live in the age of suf-focating media coverage that al-ways asks the talking heads for their predictions. We need teams with humility representing us at the world stage, and until the weight of the expectations and media coverage are eased, this won’t happen.

Buying into the team concept and humility are by no means revolutionary ideas for success in athletics. In fact, they’re re-ferred to ad nauseum in the sports world. However, I do feel that our most recent national teams have lost sight of these two key elements to success. If we don’t rediscover them, our “winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing” mindset might just become a “winning isn’t every-thing” one.

Chris Mahr ’07 bats fifth for the Dienasty softball team, which features overwhelming talent AND players that buy into the team concept.

PAGE 8 THE BROWN DAILY HERALD WEDNESDAY, MARCH 22, 2006

Mahrcontinued from page 12

gan, they had an extra practice at 7:30 a.m. in order to prepare them for the season. They have also shown constant strides in practice, which has given them confidence on the mound this season.

“Their work ethic has been very impressive,” Wilson said. “In practice they are working hard and you can see the im-provement carry over to the games. They are hitting the cor-ners a lot better and their pitch-es have a lot more movement now than they did in the very beginning of the year.”

Catching for the young guns will be returning starter Amy Baxter ’08. On the other side of the plate, Baxter provides some power for Brown. Last year she was second on the team with four home runs and has already hit two this season.

While the three pitchers have been steady on the mound and Baxter has been a mainstay be-hind the plate, the Bears have three new starters in the field. Second baseman Ava Ameni ’09, first baseman Kelsey Wil-son ’09 and outfielder Kaitlyn Laabs ’09 are second, third and fourth, respectively, in batting average.

“Ava and Kelsey have shown the ability to hit really well in

key situations,” Sarah Wilson said. “They have really been able to drive in runs.”

Those three have made an impact offensively, while Kari Best ’09 has flashed some leather in centerfield. She is leading the team in putouts with 20, and has a perfect field-ing percentage. The highlight of Best’s young career came last weekend when she robbed a hitter of a home run in a key situation.

“They are all extremely con-fident and have no fear,” said tri-captain Rachel Fleitell ’06. “They came in ready to con-tribute and have already done that.”

Helping aid the growth of the first-years will be the re-turn of All-Ivy infielder Jaimie Wirkowski ’06 to the lineup af-ter being sidelined all season with an injury. She will make her debut when Brown takes the field this weekend in Balti-more at the University of Mary-land-Baltimore classic.

With this growing nucleus of young talent, the softball team is headed in the right direction.

“This is the best freshman class since I have been here,” Fleitell said.

Softballcontinued from page 12

distortion, sickness and disease, she said.

“I want people to be drawn to the texture. They should go up close and investigate,” Bailey said. The piece is ephemeral in that she reconstructs the instal-lation each time she exhibits it. Because the piece is physically deteriorating, the medium itself changes with time. Thus, the ex-perience of viewing this piece changes with the work itself, re-acting to both time and space.

Although the title of the in-stallation alludes to Bailey’s own experience, it also encourages the viewer to examine its specific qualities. The temporality of the work itself creates an intensely unique viewing experience. This emphasis on personal interpre-tation is seen in other pieces as well.

“I hope people will take away their own sense of what is hap-pening,” said Lauren Gidwitz ’06, whose two oil paintings are on ex-hibit. One of her pieces, “Gaeas,” which refers to the Greek goddess

worshipped as the mother of the earth, depicts several lounging, female nudes who are decapitat-ed. On the edge of the painting, half of a man carries a woman’s head — a representation of the artist — by the hair. The figure’s assertive gaze raises questions of agency and identity as well as responsibility in represent-ing women in art. Although this painting is a reaction to the im-ages of femininity by male artists that Gidwitz has seen, the main context of the painting is open to interpretation. “I try to keep it ambiguous to have viewers make their own perceptions of it. So it becomes personalized,” she said.

For Shanay Jhazeri ’07, who was born and raised in Bombay, India, his experience at Brown facilitated an artistic freedom that allowed for him to raise questions about his identity. In his experimental film, “Ado-ration/Adornment,” which he made for MC 71: “Introduction to Filmmaking,” Shanay grap-ples with issues of identity un-der patriarchy. He was inspired by his grandmother’s experi-ence as a widow after his grand-father’s death.

“Eastern women do not have

the freedom in choice range whereas the white man has the ability to transform himself,” Jhazeri said.

Some artists, however, seek to invoke specific emotions from viewers. In Sean Tiner ’06’s digi-tally manipulated photograph, “Katrina Nightmare,” he depicts the rubble-filled city of New Or-leans after Hurricane Katrina. Through his work, Tiner said he wanted to show the need for con-tinued support in the affected re-gion. Tiner said he was shocked by what he saw during a trip to New Orleans in January.

“Right after the hurricane there was a lot of intense expo-sure, but now there still needs to be a lot of work,” he said. “My goal is to have the viewer (of the work) become a viewer of the di-saster and then feel the need to assist.”

Ultimately, the works of art ex-hibited foster a discussion about the interaction between artist and viewer. Without prompting specific conclusions, these works are innate products of each indi-vidual’s experience and concept of self.

The exhibit is on view through April 2.

WEDNESDAY, MARCH 22, 2006 THE BROWN DAILY HERALD PAGE 9

base when he is not pitching. Tews has swung a hot bat to start the season, collecting nine hits in only 16 at-bats, a .562 average. Catcher Devin Thomas ’07, also a preseason All-Ivy selection, starts behind the plate for the third year in a row. Thomas leads the team in doubles so far this year with three.

The Bears’ lineup also wel-comes some new faces that will fill the holes left by last year’s graduating class. Leftfielder Ryan Murphy ’08 only appeared as a pinch-runner in his rookie campaign but has stepped into the starting lineup and gone 7-for-18 in the early-going, bat-ting mostly from the leadoff spot.

“He’s done a great job,” Hughes said of Murphy. “He’s made a huge turnaround since last year. He’s done a really good job of getting on base and just putting the ball on the ground. He’s done a really good job setting the table.”

A trio of first-years — Rob-ert Papenhause ’09, Matt Nuz-zo ’09 and Dan Shapiro ’09 — have also shown promise and are competing with each other for starting jobs on the left side of the infield. Papen-hause and Shapiro will vie for the shortstop position; Sha-piro is also in the running for the third base job with Nuzzo and Brian Kelaher ’08.

“Those positions aren’t de-fined yet, but we (have) some guys in the mix and sometimes it’s just going with who you feel has the hot hand,” Drab-inski said. “We expect a lot out of this freshman group and I think they expect a lot from themselves, which is good.”

Another new face in the Bears’ lineup is a familiar one. Jeff Dietz ’08 led the Bears with a 4-0 record and 3.60 ERA last year, but he only had four at-bats. This season, Dietz will see time at first base on days he does not pitch, and could bat for himself on days he does.

“He’s got great instincts

and he knows how to play the game,” said Drabinski of Di-etz, who hit his first career home run against Vanderbilt. “He worked really hard on his hitting this off-season and he’s really become a much better hitter.”

Dietz joins Tews and co-captain Shaun McNamara ’06 in a solid starting rotation. Last year, Dietz pitched well down the stretch, including a complete-game, eight-strike-out victory over Harvard. Tews was the Bears’ most consis-tent starter, pitching 60 in-nings and going 2-3 with 5.55 ERA. McNamara went 3-1 with a 4.96 ERA.

“(McNamara’s) throwing a lot more strikes,” Drabinski said. “He’s had a good, lively fastball. He’s pitched pretty consistently and I’m looking for that from him every start.”

Drabinski has not picked a fourth starter, but he says that Ethan Silverstein ’07 currently has the advantage over Alex Sil-verman ’08. He said he will most likely make his decision over the team’s spring-break trip to Virginia and North Carolina.

Whoever does not earn the fourth spot will be expected to work out of the bullpen. Rob Hallberg ’08 took over the closer’s role last season and has returned to the position. Hallberg had an outstand-ing outing in the final game against Vanderbilt, hurling 3 2/3 innings of one-run ball and coming one strike away from a four-inning save.

“As a freshman it was re-ally nerve-wracking (being a closer), said Hallberg, who throws his fastball in the low-to-mid 90s and has added a split-finger fastball to his repertoire. “But I’m much more confident in my pitch-ing this year. I’m comfortable in the role.”

The Bears travel to Lexing-ton, Va., this weekend to play three games against the Vir-ginia Military Institute. They will then take on three North Carolina teams — Elon Uni-versity, Davidson College and Greensboro College — during the week, before starting the Ivy season at the University of Pennsylvania on April 1.

Baseballcontinued from page 12

ing into this year, Brown under-stood that it would have to ex-pect some production from its first-year class in order to com-pete in the Ivy League.

“We knew that they were go-ing to be a huge part of our team before the season even started,” Staley said. “The older girls kind of pulled them aside and told them what we expected of them heading into the year.”

One position where the Bears

will rely on a returning member of the squad is in net, where goaltender Melissa King ’08 as-sumes the starting role. She served as the backup to Julia Southard ’05 last year and saw action in only two games. This year, King has been impressive early and boasts a record of 2-2 so far while saving over 54 per-cent of the shots she has faced.

The team will continue to work itself into shape with three more non-conference games heading into the start of Ivy League play in April. Brown has two games over Spring Break — at home against St. Bonaven-

ture University and at the Uni-versity of New Hampshire.

“We’re really focusing on get-ting into a groove once we hit the Ivy games in April,” Staley said.

Before it gets to break, Brown will try to even its record on Thursday at the College of the Holy Cross.

“We’re pretty psyched about the season,” Staley said. “We have a lot of experience and some young players that are al-most there. Once we get closer to the Ivy League season, we should be right there with the top teams.”

W. laxcontinued from page 12

students to place in first-year substance-free housing each summer, ResLife must take into account both the number of requests as well as the phys-ical limitations of the dorm fa-cilities. Rosario Navarro, as-sistant director of housing ResLife, wrote in an e-mail to The Herald that “the number of first-years who request sub-stance-free varies from year to year, which in turn deter-mines where the students are assigned. … Last year we had a significant number of first-years request substance-free housing. We will not know the numbers of incoming first-years who will request sub-stance-free until the end of June.”

In general, members of sub-stance-free floors form a self-sus-taining community to find modes

of recreation that do not involve alcohol or drugs and respect one another’s social philosophies.

“It’s not like we had to sign anything,” said Meltzer. “Every-one wants to be there.”

Jordan Chesin ’09, anoth-er resident of Perkins’ second floor, sees his hall as “a large family. … The experience has been so enjoyable that (many) of us will be living together again in substance-free hous-ing in Barbour Hall next year.”

However, those placed on the substance-free floor with-out requesting it do not always share this enthusiasm.

Ida Specker ’09, a resident of Emery’s third floor, said “it seems unfair for people that didn’t re-quest substance-free to be placed in specialty housing with certain standards they have to adhere to. And for the people that did re-quest it, they’re expecting a cer-tain vibe. I feel like ResLife could have filled this hall with people that actually wanted it.”

“I’m kind of upset that I

didn’t get that stereotypical freshman dorm experience,” she added. “I guess I’ll have to get that sophomore year.”

Within Perkins, Chesin esti-mated that “at most, five or six people on the floor drink at par-ties and the like, but they do not come back to the dorm drunk and disrespectful towards our wishes to be substance-free. We never have to deal with drunk friends, with puke in the bath-room or with any sort of ha-rassment due to alcohol and/or other substances.”

Should any students breach the code of conduct on the substance-free halls, Navar-ro said ResLife would contact the student to review the con-cerns. “We have not had any concerns with students who have violated the contract this year, but typically the Residen-tial Peer Leaders on the floor would inform us of such con-cerns,” she wrote. “I have not had this type of meeting to date, thankfully.”

Housingcontinued from page 5

Time Inc. agrees to refundBY STEVEN LEVINGSTONWASHINGTON POST

WASHINGTON — Time, whose stable of magazines includes Time, Sports Illustrated, People and For-tune, agreed to refund an estimat-ed $4.3 million to consumers in 23 states who claimed they were billed for subscription renewals they didn’t

order.Under the settlement with the

states’ attorneys general, Time will also pay $4.5 million to cover the costs of the investigation. More than 100,000 consumers are eligible for refunds on subscriptions that were automatically renewed between January 1998 and May 2004. Under the settlement, Time must clearly

inform customers of the terms of automatic renewal and notify them prior to a subscription’s expiration so they can opt out if they prefer.

Consumer complaints about the marketing and sale of magazine subscriptions persist despite peri-odic crackdowns on deceptive prac-tices, according to the Better Busi-ness Bureau.

Student artcontinued from page 5

Allison Kwong, Night Editor

Chessy Brady, Taryn Martinez, Copy Editors

Senior Staff Writers Simmi Aujla, Stephanie Bernhard, Melanie Duch, Ross Frazier, Jonathan Herman, Rebecca Jacobson, Chloe Lutts, Caroline SilvermanStaff Writers Justin Amoah, Zach Barter, Allison Ehrich Bernstein, Brenna Carmody, Alissa Cerny, Ashley Chung, Stewart Dearing, Hannah Furst, Hannah Levintova, Hannah Miller, Aidan Levy, Taryn Martinez, Kyle McGourty, Ari Rockland-Miller, Chelsea Rudman, Kam Sripada, Robin Steele, Spencer Trice, Ila Tyagi, Sara WalterSports Staff Writers Sarah Demers, Amy Ehrhart, Erin Frauenhofer, Kate Klonick, Madeleine Marecki, George Mesthos, Hugh Murphy, Eric Perlmutter, Marco Santini, Bart Stein, Tom Trudeau, Steele WestAccount Administrators Alexandra Annuziato, Emilie Aries, Steven Butschi, Dee Gill, Rahul Keerthi, Kate Love, Ally Ouh, Nilay Patel, Ashfia Rahman, Rukesh Samarasekera, Jen Solin, Bonnie WongDesign Staff Adam Kroll, Andrew Kuo, Jason Lee, Gabriela ScarrittPhoto Staff CJ Adams, Chris Bennett, Meg Boudreau, Tobias Cohen, Lindsay Harrison, Matthew Lent, Dan Petrie, Christopher Schmitt, Oliver Schulze, Juliana Wu, Min Wu,Copy Editors Chessy Brady, Amy Ehrhart, Natalia Fisher, Jacob Frank, Christopher Gang, Yi-Fen Li, Katie McComas, Sara Molinaro, Heather Peterson, Sonia Saraiya

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EDITORIALRobbie Corey-Boulet, Editor-in-ChiefJustin Elliott, Executive EditorBen Miller, Executive EditorStephanie Clark, Senior EditorKatie Lamm, Senior EditorJonathan Sidhu, Arts & Culture EditorJane Tanimura, Arts & Culture EditorStu Woo, Campus Watch EditorMary-Catherine Lader, Features EditorBen Leubsdorf, Metro EditorAnne Wootton, Metro EditorEric Beck, News EditorPatrick Harrison, Opinions EditorNicholas Swisher, Opinions EditorStephen Colelli, Sports EditorChristopher Hatfield, Sports EditorJustin Goldman, Asst. Sports EditorJilane Rodgers, Asst. Sports EditorCharlie Vallely, Asst. Sports Editor

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THE BROWN DAILY HERALD

EDITORIAL/LETTERSTHE BROWN DAILY HERALD · WEDNESDAY, MARCH 22, 2006 · PAGE 10

L E T T E R S

In addition to including the University’s name in its title, the Web site for the Foundation for Intellectual Diversity cites “a survey of academic freedom and intellectual diversity” on campus as its sole current project. The group, which was founded by five alums who actively participated in conserva-tive political groups while at Brown, also features an image of University Hall on its homepage. But the group’s official ties to the University seem to end there — administrators interviewed by The Herald said they were unfamiliar with the foundation or its aims.

Stephen Beale ’04, chair of the group’s board of directors, said the inclusion of such features as the University Hall im-age is largely for “aesthetic” purposes. But we wonder if a direct relationship with those who influence University policy might help the foundation enact tangible change and contribute to a campus climate foundation member Christopher McAuliffe ’05 described as increasingly “politicized.”

Clearly, the foundation sees some benefits to retaining its independence. We don’t dispute that this outsider position en-hances its presence as a “watchdog” that can, as Beale said, help prevent the University from getting “carried away by it-self.” But, at the same time, it seems the goals of foundation members and University administrators are not so different that increased communication would hinder the work of ei-ther body. Beale’s goal of extending beyond “the dichotomy of liberal versus conservative” seems to align itself with the Uni-versity’s stated goal of promoting intellectual diversity on cam-pus, even if views differ on what intellectual diversity actually entails.

We support any group that aims to make long-lasting contri-butions to Brown’s campus and works to improve conditions it perceives as negative. To this end, members of the foundation should take administrators at their word when they cite initia-tives such as the Kaleidoscope Fund as part of a broader effort to enrich dialogue. Contrary to Beale’s suggestion, we doubt that administrators see such efforts as a way to “pre-empt” the foundation. Moreover, if the foundation hopes to increase cur-ricular offerings and expand beyond diversity perspectives and liberal learning courses, direct communication with adminis-trators will undoubtedly be necessary.

At the same time, administrators should help legitimize the foundation by taking steps to familiarize themselves with its mission and tactics. Though Ronald Vanden Dorpel ’71, senior vice president for University advancement, may be right when he says that past groups of alums lacked “a particularly long life or duration,” this is no excuse to dismiss the foundation’s work.

An eye on diversity

Don’t hold your tongue!

Send a guest column.opinions@browndailyherald.com

Send a letter.letters@browndailyherald.com

Apply to be a columnist.opinions@browndailyherald.com

Laura Martin ’06 makes an important point in her March 20 column “Students talking action now: Darfur.” Effective political movements always need clear goals, and student activists all too often fail because they forget this.

Martin should be pleased to know, however, that Students Taking Action Now: Darfur does not suffer from these shortcomings. On the contrary, we are currently in the midst of a nationwide student cam-paign that calls for very clear action from the U.S. government to end the crisis in Darfur.

The Power to Protect Campaign calls on Ameri-can leaders to save civilian lives in Darfur in three specific ways:

1. Extend and increase funding for African Union peacekeepers, the only international troops cur-rently deployed to Darfur. While President George W. Bush has earmarked money for a force in Darfur, Congress has yet to fully pass this measure. Martin is mistaken when she says that there is a United Na-tions force in Darfur; the U.N. forces in Sudan are actually working to resolve a completely separate conflict in southern Sudan.

2. Demand the rapid deployment of 20,000 to 30,000 well-trained, well-equipped NATO troops

who can begin to establish real security in all of Darfur. Bush has indeed given lip service to this possibility when pressed, but he must actively cam-paign for such a force with NATO allies to make it a reality.

3. Ultimately, push for a large-scale intervention, as provided for by Chapter VII of the United Nations Charter, that can comprehensively resolve the cri-sis. We agree with Martin that UN resolutions are little more than paper statements. We want a peace-keeping force that will get the job done, and we are calling on the United States to use its influence at the United Nations to make this happen.

STAND and the Genocide Intervention Net-work offer regular updates and guidance on all of these goals — and on April 28, we will bring over 500 students to Washington, D.C., to directly lobby our leaders for concrete action on Darfur. If Martin or anyone else would like to find out more, we wel-come them to visit www.powertoprotect.org.

Gabriel Corens ’06Lisabeth Meyers ’06

Scott Warren ’09Leaders, Darfur Action Network- STAND

March 20

Student activists have clear agenda, goalsTo the Editor:

OPINIONS THE BROWN DAILY HERALD · WEDNESDAY, MARCH 22, 2006 · PAGE 11

BY PETER SPRAKEGUEST COLUMNIST

Members of the Brown community need to know about the deleterious conse-quences of outsourcing the Brown Book-store to Barnes and Noble. In the first of two columns arguing against outsourcing, I want to share eight reasons why the Uni-versity should not outsource the bookstore that I have arrived at from my experience working there:

1. Let’s begin with something that’s el-ementary but underappreciated. Brown occupies the best retail footprint on a top destination street in the region. If you Google Thayer Street, you’ll find tour com-panies running coaches to southeastern New England that feature Thayer Street as a highlighted stop. The corner of Thayer and Angell streets is, for the time being, Brown geography. It’s stupid to give it up to Leonard Riggio, owner of Barnes and Noble.

2. The bookstore is the default cam-pus visitor center. Its employees can talk knowledgeably about Brown because they carry Brown IDs, go to Brown events, take staff development courses, use the Rock-efeller and Orwig Music libraries, use the Olney-Margolies Athletic Center and are ordinarily rather fond of the place. (Just try talking about Harvard for any length of time in the Harvard Square Barnes and Noble and see how far you get.)

3. Brown students pay less for their text-books now than they will if the University outsources the bookstore to Barnes and

Noble. That sounds counterintuitive, but it’s an industry fact, and here’s why: Barnes and Noble takes a markup over list price to recover its margin on short-discount textbooks. In contrast, the bookstore stays close to list price.

4. The bookstore’s advantage in used books is even greater. There’s a trade or-ganization called the National Organiza-tion of College Stores that issues annual rankings, and the bookstore is number one among selective universities in the percentage of discount-ed used books it sells. Ev-ery third textbook you buy at the bookstore is marked down 25 percent. Barnes and Noble can’t touch that. Considering the lip ser-vice University Hall gives to reducing textbook pric-es, you’d think this alone would be a Barnes and No-ble deal-breaker.

5. Brown faculty will see their syllabuses narrow if the University outsources to Barnes and Noble. We at the bookstore know this be-cause professors who’ve taught at Barnes and Noble campuses tell us their stories. Barnes and Noble is often unaccommo-dating on hard-to-get titles, imported ti-tles, non-returnable titles and the whole world of books that don’t pay. At the Uni-versity of Chicago, the humanities facul-ty has switched from Barnes and Noble to an independent store to get syllabus satisfaction.

6. How does the bookstore beat Barnes and Noble on syllabus breadth? Eighty-four years of experience is the short an-swer. There are three buyers here who se-cure textbooks, and among them they have 84 years’ employment at the bookstore and very big Rolodexes. Because Brown’s curriculum is so idiosyncratic, textbook buyers literally have to go to the ends of the earth to service it. Professors often sit with the buyers to provide obscure con-tact information. It’s a safe prediction that

Barnes and Noble’s profit-oriented men-tality would afffect many departments, in-cluding Portuguese and Hispanic studies, literary arts, comparative literature and history.

7. Barnes and Noble’s profit-oriented mentality even affects the provision of in-formation to students. Students who’ve transferred to Brown from Barnes and No-ble campuses tell us their stories. Barnes and Noble often restricts student access to syllabi before the start of school and then

discourages students from transcribing ISBN numbers while on Barnes and Noble premises. At the bookstore, one of our un-dergraduate employees worked for Barnes and Noble at her previous school and had the unpleasant job of transcription cop. She has described to us an entirely alien bookselling culture.

8. The textbook refund policy at Barnes and Noble is stingy compared to ours. At Harvard, students have three days to re-turn a book, while students at Tufts and

Boston universities only have two days. At the bookstore, the refund policy is 10 days, with sympathetic flexibility depending on your pre-dicament.

It is clear that out-sourcing the bookstore will reduce the quality of the bookstore’s service to the community. Yet, there is even more to say in defense of keeping the

bookstore independent. A forthcoming column will address outsourcing’s poten-tial effects on the bookstore’s trade books department and the Campus Shop.

Peter Sprake ‘07 is a Brown Bookstore em-ployee and invites you to check out sa-vethebookstore.org for more information regarding the bookstore’s and Barnes and Noble’s business practices.

A counterblast to Barnes and Noble

This is not a column

A Brown Bookstore employee gives us eight reasons why Brown should not outsource the bookstore

Contemporary art and politics suffer from a lack of genuine confrontation

BY MICHAL ZAPENDOWSKIOPINIONS COLUMNIST

You can usually tell when you’ve moved from the “modern” to the “contemporary” section of an art museum, even if you don’t look at the signs. You go from Picasso’s dis-tortions to a fuzzy video projection of some guy’s grandma trying to fish her glasses out of a toilet, while letters scroll by on an elec-tronic screen like termites. You go from the world of Dalí’s melting clocks, which somehow seem to explain themselves, to a section of the museum where all the artwork seems to lack an explana-tion. Despite some notable exceptions, contemporary art is clearly suffering from malaise.

This is important is because the art world has always been an outgrowth of our culture in general, and the world of avant-garde art is closely linked to the world of progressive politics. Two gen-erations ago, no one questioned the dy-namic nature of the art world or its ability to effectively confront society’s notions of artwork to a constructive end. To under-stand how we went from Picasso and Dalí to the homemade videos and Q-tip sculp-tures that populate contemporary art mu-seums, you have to look at the social con-text in which art was being created.

Two generations ago, people believed in manifestos, ideologies and collectives. They had the courage to attack one anoth-er, to say “that is not art.” Today, that state-ment has become ridiculous. Everyone in the art world now seems to agree that art is anything its creator says is art, a belief

that has filled contemporary art museums with objects that, if found outside of a mu-seum, would be quickly discarded as gar-bage. I think it would be cathartic to make big piles of all the bad artwork and burn them. Unfortunately, that idea has already been taken, and I don’t want to be associ-ated with it.

The root of the cancer eating away at the art world is clearly an excessive individual-ism and privatization. It is no accident that modern artwork reached a climax during

the age of totalitarian ideologies and total war, when the autonomy of the individual was profoundly called into question. Once upon a time, before everyone in the mid-dle class got their own room, their own car, their own computer and their own blog, “the masses” actually existed, and what happened in the public sphere actually mattered. Today, as a result of privatization, we have lost our ability to confront one an-other in the arenas of politics or art.

In order for a political or artistic con-frontation to be successful, it has to seduce, and then it has to penetrate. Its goal is to al-ter or dislodge people’s most cherished be-liefs. The era of total war, when mass terror was used to try to “re-fashion” people into obedient ideological automatons, was the high point of political confrontationalism. Today, confrontationalism has reached a

low point. We live by a philosophy of toler-ance when “art” can be anything.

As a result of this, the art world has be-come closed in on itself, no longer really trying to challenge any of society’s notions. Artists have become their own public. The real public, meanwhile, has come to appre-ciate primitive, classical and modern art — art produced before the 1960s — much more strongly than anything that has been produced since. Just look at which muse-ums are most famous and which are not.

Confrontation has been undermined by the relativistic attitude that the validity of artwork is defined solely by its creator. It has been undermined by a complete abandonment of any effort to “reach out” to find a mass audience for the work. By definition, the artist is a solitary genius, so why should he stoop to trying to be understood by the ignorant masses? Fake confrontation has substituted itself for the real thing.

Let’s look at some examples of true and fake confrontation in both postmod-ern art and politics. In 1968, a whole group of college hippies volunteered to join the campaign of anti-Vietnam War candidate Gene McCarthy, a campaign which even-tually brought down incumbent president and one-man political steamroller Lyndon Johnson. As part of their campaign, these young volunteers cut their long haircuts, changed their tie-dye shirts for button-ups and went door to door. This was called “go-ing clean for Gene.” This is an example of true confrontation, because they reached out to the general public without surren-dering any of their core beliefs. A little less than four decades later, a group of Brown students lay down on the Main Green as a metaphor for Iraqis who had been killed by bombs. That is an example of fake confron-tation. No effort was made to reach out to

anyone. In 2004, a marriage equality group or-

ganized a rally in Boston City Hall at which everyone participating stuck together and sang patriotic songs all day long for the cameras. This wasn’t easy to do since several marriage equality demonstrators kept trying to chant more militant slo-gans, but it looked really good in the press coverage. The rally created an image of patriotic activists, regular people want-ing regular rights, enduring the abuse of a bunch of Christian counter-protestors with black armbands who stood across the way screaming obscenities. That was an example of true confrontation for the TV-viewing public. The activists confronted in the same way that Dali’s clocks or Picas-so’s enormous painting of the bombarded town of Guernica confront, because the artist made an effort both to challenge and to reach out to the general public, mak-ing his artwork intuitively understandable without being formulaic.

Genuine confrontation combines the tactics of challenging your audience’s be-liefs with coming out to meet your audi-ence to make sure you effectively challenge them. Without reaching out, pseudo-con-frontations, both political and artistic, are delusional, ineffective and masturbatory exercises. Without recognizing common, core values, art and politics become futile by definition.

The world of progressive politics and the world of avant-garde art have always been intimately intertwined. Today, they are both suffering from the same problems. Ei-ther we fix the art world and the real world at the same time, or neither.

Michal Zapendowski ’07 was appalled when they first put up the Eiffel Tower but today accepts it as a work of art.

Barnes and Noble is often unaccommodating on hard-to-get titles, imported titles, non-returnable titles and the whole world of books that don’t pay.

In order for a political or artistic confrontation to be successful, it has to seduce,

and then it has to penetrate.

BY TOM TRUDEAUSPORTS STAFF WRITER

The 2006 women’s lacrosse team is off to a solid start in accomplishing its first goal of the new season — improving on last year’s 4-11 record. Head Coach Keely McDonald, now in her second campaign, lost only four seniors from last year and adds a strong core of new recruits. After two season-opening vic-tories over Sacred Heart University and Boston College, Brown (2-3) is primed to make some noise in the Ivy League.

“It’s a building program because the coach started last year,” said tri-cap-tain Kate Staley ’06. “We’re really ex-cited because we’ve worked really hard all spring so we’re looking to be a threat and surprise the league this year.”

Though the team started out hot, it has dropped its past three games to some of the nation’s best lacrosse pro-grams. Then-No. 4 the University of Maryland downed the Bears by a score of 21-5, but Brown played tough in its last two losses. Brown fell 9-8 in over-time to the University of Delaware and 16-11 to Temple University but out-played the Owls for the majority of the game after falling behind 8-1 early.

The Bears have been led so far by

their tri-captains: defender Rachel Schumacher ’06, Staley and midfield-er Meg Sullivan ’06. Staley, along with Amie Biros ’07 and Mimi DeTolla ’08, has provided the offense expected with impressive contributions. Biros tops the team with 10 goals, and Staley notched six over the weekend to give her nine on the year.

One very promising sign through the early portion of the schedule has been Brown’s first-years. Six rookies have seen extensive playing time so far, and their continued development will be very important to the program’s suc-cess. Krystina DeLuca ’09 and Bethany Buzzel ’09 provide energy and youth-ful enthusiasm on attack, while Lauren Vitkus ’09 has been great defensively, learning from more experienced de-fenders such as Jen Redd ’07.

Buzzell said the adjustment from high school level competition to the Di-vision I college game has been what she expected it to be.

“I think the biggest thing so far is that I look around the huddle and see how (good) everyone is around me,” she said. “We have some of the best defend-ers around on our backline and (the up-perclassmen) have made (the transition to college) much easier for me.”

The team graduated only four seniors last year, but one of those was Sarah Pas-sano ’05 who had 25 goals last year. Head-

BY CHARLIE VALLELYASSISTANT SPORTS EDITOR

Last year’s baseball team may have been the best in school history. Led by Ivy League Player of the Year Matt Kutler ’05, the Bears rode a potent offense to a 14-6 record in Ivy League play — a school best — and finished a game behind Har-vard in the Red Rolfe Division.

After starting the year against pe-rennial powers No. 1 Florida State Uni-versity and Vanderbilt University, the Bears are 0-6. However, they still look capable of a repeat performance in the Ivies. Though Brown graduated six se-niors — including Kutler, who hit .427 last year and was drafted by the Florida Marlins — the Bears have a strong core of returning players. First baseman Dan-ny Hughes ’06 said this season’s squad could not only match last year’s team, it could surpass it.

“I think a lot of us would be disap-pointed if we don’t win (the Ivy League),” he said. “I expect it to be a close race again, but I think we have a team this year that could win it all.”

If the Bears make a run, they will probably do so on the shoulders of an offense that returns much of last sea-son’s firepower. The lineup is anchored by first-team All-Ivy rightfielder Paul Christian ’06, centerfielder Eric Lar-son ’07, co-captain Hughes and second baseman/pitcher Bryan Tews ’07. Head Coach Marek Drabinski said no one can replace Kutler but that the offense has the tools to make up for his absence.

“I think we have enough offensively, I really do,” he said. “We definitely have the ability to score and be a good lineup. We have enough offense to replace Matt. We’re not going to have one guy do it, but we’ll have two or three guys that will pro-vide enough to win games.”

Christian and Larson were both named to the preseason All-Ivy team by Baseball America and will spearhead the Bears’ attack. Last season, Christian hit .355 with a team-high eight home runs and 38 RBIs, second only to Kutler. Lar-son hit .350 with five home runs and 30 RBIs, despite missing the second half of the conference schedule with a groin in-jury. He was also drafted last summer, taken in the 44th round by the Toronto Blue Jays.

“We’re hoping we can ride (Christian and Larson) all season,” Hughes said. “Those guys are studs and they hit the ball as well as anyone (in the league).

There’s a reason they have the accolades they have.”

Three other position players return to the starting lineup. After hitting .315 with 36 RBIs last season, Hughes will split time between first base and left-field and bat in the heart of the order be-hind Christian and Larson. Tews, a pre-season All-Ivy selection, will play second

During Monday night’s champion-ship game of the inaugural World Base-ball Classic, it seemed a little surreal to

me that Team USA wasn’t in the finals. What nagged at me even more was that the Americans did not even make it to semifinals — they were never even in a position to qualify for the champion-ship game.

Unfor tunately, America’s failures at team athletic com-

petitions on the world stage have be-come all too frequent recently. It started with the men’s basketball team’s sixth-place finish at the 2002 World Champi-onships and subsequent bronze medal at the 2004 Summer Olympics in Ath-ens. It has since continued with the per-formance of the men’s ice hockey team at the 2006 Winter Olympics and now the World Baseball Classic choke job.

This column is not a patriotic call to arms asking for Americans everywhere to help re-establish our motherland as the premier world sports power. We still pos-sess some of the best athletes in the world, and they are stronger and faster than ath-letes ever have been. Furthermore, sports have never been more popular or more far-reaching across the country. We have basketball players from Alaska, such as Carlos Boozer, and hockey players from

SPORTS WEDNESDAYTHE BROWN DAILY HERALD · MARCH 22, 2006 · PAGE 12

CHRIS MAHRMAHRTIAN

ENCOUNTERS

Ashley Hess / Herald

Devin Thomas ’07 enters his third season behind the plate for the Bears. He earned a second straight All-Ivy Honorable Mention last year after knocking in 26 runs.

Last season’s success is this season’s goal for baseball team full of new faces

W. lax aims to improve, make noise in Ivy League standings

WEDNESDAY, MARCH 22

W. TENNIS: vs. Connecticut, 3 p.m., Pizzitola Center

BROWN SPORTS SCHEDULE

Team USA’s record at World Baseball Classic is standard

see MAHR, page 8

JUSTIN GOLDMANASSISTANT SPORTS EDITOR

Filling a departing senior’s shoes can be a difficult proposition for a college freshman. So far, however, the first-years on the softball team have made a seamless transition.

Last season, Brown depended on Uchenna Omokaro ’05 and Maris-sa Berkes ’05 on the mound. The duo pitched every inning for Bruno with great success. Omokaro was named second team All-Ivy, while Berkes racked up 125 innings with 51 strike-outs and only 25 walks.

This year, the Bears welcomed three newcomers to the mound. All of whom have had an immediate impact.

“There is an extreme amount of pressure on them because there are no other upperclassmen pitchers for them to look up to,” said outfielder Sar-ah Wilson ’06. “However, they have re-ally been able to handle that pressure. There have been a lot of situations this season where they have had to pitch out of bases-loaded jams and they were able to do that with success.”

Although Melissa Moses ’09 has a 1-4 record, the number in the loss column is a bit misleading. Two of her defeats were by only one run, and she leads the team with 26 strikeouts, a 3.18 ERA and an opponents’ batting average of .233.

So far, Heather Garrison ’09 has complemented Moses nicely on the mound, with hopes of forming a one-two punch, much like Omokaro and Berkes from a season ago. Garrison is the team leader in wins with three and in innings pitched with 36 and is sec-

ond in complete games with three.“Replacing Uchi and Berke is

something that is very difficult,” said Head Coach Pam McCreesh. “But this has been a process. Each day they are getting better and gaining valuable experience.”

While Garrison and Moses have been piling up a lot of innings for Brown this year, Kristen Schindler ’09 has shown the ability to be another reliable pitch-er for the Bears. In limited innings, she is second on the team in ERA (3.78) and first in hits allowed (17).

These first-year hurlers have made the smooth transition into the spotlight thanks to their tireless work ethic from the fall to now. Before the season be-

Performance of new pitchers will be key to softball in 2006

Ashley Hess / Herald

Amy Baxter ’08 is responsible for han-dling Brown’s young pitching staff while also providing some pop at the plate.

see SOFTBALL, page 8

see BASEBALL, page 9

see W. LAX, page 9