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Vol. 105Issue 21

Wednesday, September 3, 2014

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After a false start, the wheels are now in motion for the Student Travel Grant program.

The program is the brainchild of Stu-dent Government Board President, Mike Nites, and will create a fund for individual students conducting research to receive up to $250 to travel to conferences to present their work. At the beginning of

each fi scal year, the Board will set aside $20,000 from the sum it allocates from the Student Activities Fund.

Undergraduate, full-time and non-College of General Studies students con-tribute $160 in student activities fees to the fund annually.

For this semester, the Board will only put aside $10,000, so Board members can evaluate the project. If the trial run goes well, Nites said, the Board will reserve the additional $10,000 for the remainder of

the fi scal year. Nites pitched the program in February

with an expected launch last semester. The launch took longer than expected, according to Nites, so the Board decided to move the trial run to this semester.

Although Nites has previously said he wants to limit spending, specifi cally among club sports, he said the grant will allow students who aren’t involved in club

STUDENT GOVERNMENTSTUDENT GOVERNMENT

Board test-drives travel grant programAbbey Reighard

Senior Staff Writer

Interested students swarmed the WPU last night to meet the ladies of Pitt’s sororities. Theo Schwarz | Staff Photographer

For Matt Aelmore, making money as a musi-cian is a “tricky situation.”

Aelmore is one of many Pitt students who work as musicians and hope to make a little money on the side while doing it. According to the Department of Music’s website, there are about 40 graduate stu-dents and 50 undergraduate music majors, and Pittsburgh o! ers a host of venues for student artists. The competition is tough, but Aelmore and other students learn how to network with employers, manage time and update their skill sets in a way that beats sitting in a cubicle.

When he plays at bars with his band, the AM Faces, they usually get a cut of what the bar makes at the door. The band has played at bars such as Gooskie’s in Polish Hill and Howlers in Downtown. Aelmore said he didn’t feel comfortable giving an exact fi gure of his earnings, but said it’s “not much.”

“To really make money, it’s kind of a lot-tery thing,” Aelmore said.

Aelmore plays the french horn, guitar and electric bass, but he actually gets more jobs as a composer than as a performer. As a commissioned composer, Aelmore, a doctoral student studying music theory and

Musical backgrounds pay off for studentsAnjana Muriali

Staff Writer

Music 2SGB 2

SISTER SISTER

2 September 3, 2014 | The Pitt News | www.pittnews.com

composition, writes experimental music theatre.

It’s tough to get paid jobs, but for him, making money in music is mostly working with perseverance and making friends and connections in the music world.

Benjamin Clifton agrees with Aelmore’s approach but says getting paid gigs is not hard if you know the right people.

“Going to these jazz sessions as a music player is the same thing as a job interview in the corporate world,” said Clifton, a senior majoring in math and jazz music. “You go and listen to and play with people. If they like what you are playing and they have a gig, they will call you up.”

Never leave a gig with less than $100, he said, although getting paid for performing depends on the level of the player.

“It’s kind of hard to set your own rates

because a lot of times when people call you up, they already have a set rate that they are going to pay you,” Clifton said.

Perhaps more di! cult than setting a rate as a student musician is setting a weekly schedule.

Balancing school with music does get hectic sometimes, but Aelmore has become accustomed to working on multiple projects simultaneously.

Similarly for Clifton, making room for both work and play isn’t much of a hassle.

“I have a lot of opportunities to play, but the nice thing about being a student and a keyboard player is that I can choose how much I want to do,” Clifton said.

The music Clifton plays for gigs varies depending on the event. As a jazz musi-cian, Clifton doesn’t have to rehearse a lot because jazz musicians are well-versed in the standards.

“I’ve shown up to gigs where I don’t even know what I’m going to play, and most of the time I don’t know who I’m playing with,”

Clifton said. Working as a student musician might not

pay much, or even at all, but when it comes to travel opportunities, the job has its perks.

Last year, Aelmore went to Germany for a week to put on an hour-long music pro-duction. Aelmore also had the opportunity to open for Eddie Money in 2006 with the song “Two Tickets to Paradise” for a crowd of 10,000 people.

He’s currently working on a piece for a British fl utist, Lucas Jordan, and next week, he starts playing with the Dangdut Cow-boys, an Indonesian pop band.

Like Aelmore, senior Emily Rohrer uses her musical talent to escape the campus bubble.

Rohrer, a nursing major, is a soprano singer in the Heinz Chapel Choir and mu-sical director for campus a capella group The Pitt Pendulums. While Rohrer doesn’t personally receive compensation for paid gigs, the Pendulums receive money by those who book them,which is used to cover her

and other members’ travel costs and group merchandise.

As musical director, Rohrer is in charge of getting the group to create a musical product that is a performance.

This entails preparing for and running rehearsals as well as organizing music for the semester. The group puts on a concert every semester and does other gigs on the side.

The Pitt Pendulums get requests for gigs around every two weeks on campus, Rohrer said, and they choose them based on the group’s availability.

As with all three musicians, the trick to making money in the music world is to try new things and to share song in many di" erent forms.

“My goal is to have many, many bas-kets to put my eggs in,” Aelmore said. “The model that works for me is di" erent aspects of performing, composing and teaching and hopefully they all come together in di" erent ways and I’ll make a living.”

MUSICFROM PAGE 1

sports or organizations to still take ad-vantage of the Student Activities Fund.

“For some students, [research] is their extracurricular activity,” Nites said. “We never really had a way for [individual] students to benefi t from the fund.”

Nites said the amount given to each student will be determined by the amount of money spent by the student on travel, lodging and registration fees.

To be eligible for the program, stu-dents must be presenting their research at a conference. The grant does not apply to students who are only attending, but

not presenting, at research conferences. “We’re not evaluating their research,”

Nites said. “If you meet the requirement, you’ll get the grant.”

Nites based the funding amounts on the travel grant program run by Georgia Tech’s Student Government Association that it introduced last fall. At Pitt, eight students have applied to the Student Travel Grant program so far this semes-ter, according to Nites. Applications are available on the SGB website.

SGB will award grants to individual students, whereas the Allocations Com-mittee and the Board typically distrib-ute Student Activities funds to student groups only.

Also unlike supplemental funds that

student groups request at weekly meet-ings, the Allocations Committee will not review travel grant requests nor will the Board vote on requests during public meetings. Instead, a committee of Stu-dent Government members will approve travel grants in private.

Nites selected SGB Manager and Board member Abby Zurschmit, Academic Af-fairs Chair Alyse Johnson, Allocations Chair Nasreen Harun and Board members Sara Klein and Nick Hufnagel to sit on the committee.

The program only applies to under-graduate, non-College of General Studies students because graduate students and CGS students have their own separate activities funds.

The Board will give tentative approval for the travel grants prior to the research conference and will then reimburse con-ference costs at a later date, so the Board can use receipts as evidence that the student attended the conference. Travel grants will not cover students’ food costs or overseas transportation, according to its Allocations Manual.

Nites said SGB will publish the student recipients’ names on its website and an-nounce them at public meetings.

“It’s something that they can brag about, that they received a travel grant and that they were invited to present their research,” Nites said.

SGBFROM PAGE 1

Read the rest online at Pittnews.com.

3September 3, 2014 | The Pitt News | www.pittnews.com

OPINIONS

With each new semester, students go textbook shopping — a fi scally painful experience that tends to start the year o! on a sour note.

A report this year by the U.S. Public Interest Research Group Education Fund found that students spend, on average, $1,200 per year on textbooks and school supplies — this equates to just more than 7 percent of the in-state tuition rate for Pitt students.

Current prices are the result of an 82 percent rise in the price of textbooks over the last decade, according to the research group’s

report. So, what is a Pitt student to do?Well, to start, ditch the new

textbooks and buy used. While the newest editions of textbooks are often sold at, or near, the price rec-ommended by publishing houses, it’s easy to fi nd used books with much cheaper price tags at sites like Better World Books, Biblio and Valorebooks.

But the student demand for the newer books still remains , even though publishers continue to keep their price higher than the used ver-sions.

Consumers seem to lack the knowledge, time and energy needed to change this trend, but publishers

have also e! ectively distorted the secondary markets that exist for used books. The formation of such markets occurs for most durable goods, like used vs. new cars.

For any fi rm selling goods in a primary market, they must keep customers coming back for their product to stay in business. So, in the same way that car manufacturers might release new vehicle models with enhanced features, textbook publishers will release new editions of textbooks, with updated content to include developments in the fi eld. Also, most professors using a partic-ular textbook require their students to use the most recent edition.

Because of the secondary mar-

ket , publishers are incentivized to produce newer editions with mini-mal changes from the previous work. This swiftly reduces the sec-ondary market for their particular textbook, allowing them to charge higher prices.

But, that doesn’t mean students must buy the newest edition. If the required text is simply a reference guide for the class, and they won’t pull homework problems from it, newer editions are usually unneces-sary — unless there happened to be some drastic changes. So, just be-cause used books are cheaper, they don’t o! er lower quality material.

Additionally, the international editions of textbooks are widely

available online, which almost al-ways contain content identical to the U.S. editions at a reduced price.

Textbooks sold abroad are “priced to market.” That is, since the demand for textbooks is signifi -cantly reduced outside of the U.S. and European market, textbooks are sold in foreign areas at a price much lower than the same book sold to western students, even though the content (and language) of the texts are exactly the same.

Unfortunately for publishers, such a pricing strategy leaves text-books open to what economists call arbitrage. In this case, market

Another student’s treasure: Why to buy used textbooksThomas Helgerman

Columnist

COLUMN

Helgerman 4

Student-voter rights challenged by photo ID lawsEDITORIALEDITORIAL

As students at Pitt of the legal voting age, we experience a relative amount of con-venience. All it takes is simply fi lling out a voter registration form — one you can easily receive from a member of a student political organization roaming around campus dur-ing election season.

This convenience was nearly jeopardized in 2012 when the Corbett administration passed a law requiring voters to produce a state-approved photo ID at the polls. But, in January of this year, Judge Bernard L. McGin-ley struck down the law as unconstitutional. In his decision, he said, “Voting laws are designed to assure a free and fair election ... The voter ID law does not further this goal.”

Thus, out-of-state college students in Pennsylvania were once again able to vote in the state in which they live eight months of the year without obtaining a “state-approved photo ID.”

Our experience is not synonymous with that of all college students across the country. There are currently eight, mostly southern, states that maintain strict voter ID laws — Pennsylvania would have been

included in that bunch had the 2012 law not been struck down.

These states make voting particularly di" cult for many college students, not to mention minorities. This is the case the U.S. Justice Department is bringing up against the state of Texas in its most recent lawsuit regarding voter ID.

The trial, which began Tuesday, high-lights the recent struggle between prevent-ing voter fraud and ensuring fair elections.

The federal Justice Department and civil rights groups argue that the Texas law dis-proportionately excludes many minorities and college students from voting. According to the law, voters must present at the poll a photo ID — a Texas driver’s license, U.S. passport, a state-issued ID card, a state-issued election certifi cate, military ID, citizenship certifi cate with a photograph issued by the federal government or a con-cealed handgun license. A student ID does not count.

Texas insists that these regulations ef-fectively prevent voter fraud, which Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott has called

an “epidemic.” But after 13 years in o" ce, Abbott cites two fraudulent votes that might have been stopped by the ID law — that’s one out of every 18.7 million votes cast in Texas.

According to the logic of the states ar-gument, even though 796,000 Texans — including students — lack an approved ID, the law is apparently justifi ed in stopping the scant number of fraudulent votes that might occur.

The U.S. Justice Department’s argument appears to be much more sound: this law unfairly discriminates against students and minorities.

The 26th Amendment to the Constitu-tion, the one that shifted the voting age to 18, says the right to vote, “shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any state on account of age.”

To ask students — a demographic that cast almost 20 million votes in 2012 — to obtain a state-approved photo ID does just that. Not only are many students at public universities from other states, but many do not have the time or the resources to

go through the process that is required to obtain a state-approved photo ID.

So, whether it was intentional or not, the Texas law specifi cally targets college students because it puts an unnecessary bur-den on them when it comes to voting — one that does not belong to other demographics besides, arguably, minorities.

Of course, Texas is not the only state that has voter ID laws like this. North Carolina also recently passed a similar law — sched-uled for 2016 — that would restrict students from using college IDs or out-of-state li-censes when voting at the polls.

If the case in Texas is won by the U.S. Justice Department, the decision could reverberate in other states, such as North Carolina, that also have strict voter ID laws for students — hopefully, setting the stage for similar lawsuits.

This case provides an important fi rst step in ensuring that college students are prop-erly represented in our democracy — a step that will hopefully lead to the opportunity for all college students to participate in elec-tions, both on the state and federal levels.

4 September 3, 2014 | The Pitt News | www.pittnews.com

participants are motivated to buy textbooks internationally at the reduced prices, then sell these textbooks in the U.S. at a higher price — still much lower than the publisher’s price — for a profi t. Indeed, any cursory online search shows that this is exactly what happens.

Of course, the sophomore who has recently purchased his or her fi rst international edi-tion of a textbook might be taken aback (and possibly alarmed) at the warning label on the cover that reads something like “Not for sale in the United States.”

As one might expect, publishers have tried to prevent arbitrage from taking place, as this lowers the price they can charge in the U.S. market. As a result, they include such warn-ing labels on their products and even taken legal action.

Fortunately for us students, the Supreme Court ruled in Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (2013) that owners of copyright materi-als — in this case textbooks — cannot legally stop the resale of these materials in secondary markets within the United States.

The fi nal way to minimize your textbook cost is to sell back your books after you’ve used them. After taking a course, you most likely will not need to reference the textbook

at any point after its closure — besides making your bookshelf more diverse, there isn’t much benefi t in keeping them.

Fortunately, selling textbooks online is a relatively simple task. Many websites, such as Chegg, will buy back your used books.

But your kickback is dependent on when you sell.

A 2012 study found that the best time to sell textbooks is between Aug. 20 and 26 and between Jan. 7 and 13. This is because demand for textbooks is highest during these times, as college semesters are starting across the country. Consequently, suppliers are willing to pay higher prices since they themselves can obtain a higher price selling to these students.

The study also reported that the worst time to sell is between Nov. 19 and 25 and between April 9 and 15. Also, since demand in the secondary market is at it lowest, it’s an ideal time to buy.

Of course, this textbook strategy requires more time and e! ort on the part of the stu-dent, but the fi nancial end gain is substantial compared to the simple and costly method of buying brand new textbooks semester after semester.

So, for students who bought all of their books new and, quite literally, paid the price, there is a way to save yourselves from those biannual costs — become an active participant in the used book market.

HELGERMANFROM PAGE 3

E S T A B L I S H E D 1 9 1 0

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5September 3, 2014 | The Pitt News | www.pittnews.com

SPORTSFOOTBALLFOOTBALL

The praise keeps coming for Pitt foot-ball following its 62-0 win against Delaware.

Sophomore running back James Con-ner and senior offensive guard Matt Ro-theram were given weekly ACC honors for their performances in the season

opener, according to a release from E.J. Borghetti, Pitt’s Associate Athletic Director. . Conner was named the ACC’s Offensive Back of the Week, and Ro-theram was named the conference’s Offensive Lineman of the Week.

Conner rushed for 153 yards on 14 carries. He also made it into the end-zone for four touchdowns, which marks half of his total from all of last season.

Rotheram led a stout offensive line that did not allow one sack on quarter-back Chad Voytik’s 14 attempts. The rushing attack also rumbled for more than seven yards per attempt and seven total touchdowns on the day, taking advantage of Rotheram and the rest of the offensive line pushing around Dela-ware’s defense. Pitt’s 409 total rushing yards split among the team marked the

most since its 1976 national champion-ship game.

The dominant win earned the team a vote in the Associated Press Top 25 poll that came out Tuesday. Conner and Rotheram will look to build on excellent starts to the football season when the Panthers travel to Boston College on Friday. Kickoff against the Eagles is at 7 p.m. on ESPN.

James Conner, Matt Rotheram awarded ACC weekly honorsChris Puzia

Assistant Sports Editor

This summer’s FIFA World Cup Brazil inspired some Americans to become more invested in rooting for profes-sional soccer worldwide.

Now, at the beginning of the English 2014-2015 Barclays Premier League season, that newfound fandom comes in at an interesting time: There is no dominant dynastic team, and for Americans looking to get into the sport for the first time, they need one. New-comers to the league and the sport in general would have little knowledge of a dominant team’s rich history of success, something that would give them perspective on the state of Eng-lish soccer.

For the past two decades, the Eng-lish team Manchester United ruled the Premier League, which is England’s top soccer league, considered the most competitive league in Europe . They were a globally-recognized powerhouse and essentially the soccer version of the New York Yankees: Everybody, whether a fan of the sport or not, knew the team.

Manchester United, filled with rec-ognizable names like Wayne Rooney,

Ryan Giggs and Ruud van Nistelrooy, dominated the league. During legend-ary coach Sir Alex Ferguson’s tenure from 1986 to 2013, the team won the league 13 times, the Football Associa-tion Challenge Cup five times and the UEFA Champions League twice.

Then, Ferguson retired in May 2013. After having the same manager for nearly 30 years, United has already fired his successor, David Moyes, and current manager Louis van Gaal is un-der pressure from fans and the media to improve after a slow start to the new season.

Only three games into the new Pre-mier League season, United has already lost its opener to Swansea City, and it has drawn Sunderland and Burnley, adding up to only two league points thus far — one point for each draw and zero points for the loss.

Even more humiliating, the team suffered a brutal 4-0 defeat on Aug. 26 in the Capital One Cup at the hands of Milton Keynes Dons, a team that plays two divisions below United. Van Gaal himself said after the loss that people need to be patient with the team.

“I hope the fans maintain their

Casual American soccer fans need British dynastiesChris Puzia

Assistant Sports Editor

COLUMNCOLUMN

Wayne Rooney is one of the few players remaining from Mancester United’s glory days in the past decade. | MCT Campus Soccer 7

6 September 3, 2014 | The Pitt News | www.pittnews.com

While most of the country views foot-ball as its prized national pastime, the National Football League has its problem s. The one at the forefront of national conversation recently is player health and safety as well as how the sport’s inherent risk of concussions is destroying retired — and some cur-rent — players.

But there’s another issue that, rather quietly, has been steadily plaguing the league and its players: domestic abuse. On Aug. 29, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell announced sweeping new do-mestic abuse sanctions for players, and since that announcement, another al-legation has come forward against a 49ers defensive end.

The cases of domestic abuse charges against NFL players are almost as easy

to rattle off as the past five Super Bowl winners. Most recently, there was Ra-vens running back Ray Rice — captured on tape dragging his unconscious fiance out of an elevator after an altercation — and then there was 49ers defensive end Ray McDonald — accused this past week of punching a pregnant woman. In addition, Panthers Pro Bowl defen-sive end Greg Hardy was charged with assaulting and threatening his ex-girl-friend this past summer. Stars like wide receiver Brandon Marshall and retired linebacker James Harrison have both been charged in the past as well.

For a league so predicated on ag-gression, perhaps it isn’t shocking that violence occurs so often off the field as well. According to a report on Nate Silver’s website FiveThirtyEight, there have been 83 domestic violence-related arrests of NFL players since 2000 .

But why all the fuss now? Why hasn’t

there been a bigger uproar before? One reason: timing.

People were incredulous when Com-missioner Roger Goodell announced that Ray Rice would only be suspended for a measly two games as a result of his heinous actions. A month later, when Cleveland Browns receiver Josh Gordon was suspended for an entire season for his second failed drug test due to mari-juana, people began to look closer at the NFL’s handling of domestic abuse, calling for change.

Goodell responded to the clamor by modifying the league’s policy on domes-tic abuse, implementing new guidelines that dictate a six-game suspension for a first violation and a lifetime ban for the second. Despite seemingly being directly caused by Rice’s case, his sus-pension has not been altered.

Though it is a step in the right di-rection and some are happy with this

resolution, I still am not. First, the sus-pension parameters are illogical. If a second suspension carries as great a weight as a lifetime ban, then the first suspension should be much more harsh than six games.

If the NFL wanted to discourage this behavior, the league would have enacted a season-long first offense suspension.

A season-long suspension would place a permanent mark on the player, rather than becoming an afterthought about players like Marshall or Harri-son. These are the types of transgres-sions that the NFL should be flexing its punitive muscle on, rather than failed marijuana tests.

Instead, the new rules reek of insin-cerity, only attempting to appease the rumblings of paying fans rather than taking a strong stance on a straight-

New NFL domestic violence penalties may still not be enoughDan Sostek Staff Writer

COLUMNCOLUMN

NFL 7

7September 3, 2014 | The Pitt News | www.pittnews.com

confidence in the club and in our phi-losophy because that philosophy takes time,” quoted the team’s official Twitter account from van Gaal.

Simply put, the old guard of Man-chester United is now gone.

For the first time in about 20 years, English soccer does not have a soli-tary, universally acknowledged face for the league, and for Americans who are looking to break into watching and following the sport, this is bad.

If you ask anyone around the world to name a baseball team, the first team they would probably say is the New York Yankees. The team is more than just a team now — it’s a brand. In every country, you will find someone wearing a trademark Yankees hat or T-shirt.

Manchester United still holds that same aura among current fans. But for people who do not already associ-ate European soccer with Manchester United — like Americans unfamiliar

with the history of the league — the team won’t leave the same impression. For them, the storied United will not be synonymous with European soccer.

This would be the first generation in a long time for which that’s the case.

Last year, Manchester City won the Premier League, with Liverpool finish-ing a close second and Chelsea taking third. Those teams are still favored for the title this season, but it is shaping up to be just what it was last season: a close contest with a few favorites, rather than just one.

With City retaining its core players like David Silva and Vincent Kompany, Liverpool acquiring Italian striker Ma-rio Balotelli and Chelsea signing Diego Costa and Cesc Fabregas, all of these teams are dangerous and likely to con-tend at the end of the season.

While this is great news for longtime soccer fans and anyone who likes good competition, many new entrants into a sport often look for a starting point — something familiar and recognizable to latch onto.

With all due respect to lesser teams

like Hull City, Leicester City and Burn-ley FC, it is much less likely that brand new American fans will see them as a popular candidate to root for.

This is not to say that everyone will be a bandwagon fan just because one dominant team exists. It is true, how-ever, that it is difficult to follow soccer closely in America because games are rarely broadcast on television stations here. An iconic team like the old Man-chester United would help this.

NBC Sports Network and Fox Sports Network occasionally broadcast Pre-mier League games, but ESPN does not. Television viewership without special cable packages in the United States is minimal.

However, if a team steps up over the course of the next few years and wins several Premier League titles in a row, it could hopefully spark more television exposure for the league overseas and give new fans a name to root for.

For new American fans to have an easier time breaking into the league, a new dynasty emerging would go a long way towards bridging that gap.

forward issue. While the lifetime ban seems extremely stringent on paper, it simply exists to make sure a player who has committed a violation once won’t commit one again, rather than making a point to simply prevent these violations from occurring in the first place.

This is yet another example of Com-missioner Goodell being reactionary rather than preventative. Every move he makes, from domestic abuse policy to player safety, seems to be solely in-fluenced by public outcry rather than by his own moral compass.

With a decision pending on the 49ers’ McDonald, who was charged on a felony count for abuse of a pregnant woman, Goodell has a chance to set a precedent. The new domestic abuse policy allows for harsher punishment if the victim is pregnant. The commissioner can prove a lot of doubters wrong with a swift and severe penalty.

Here’s hoping he does.

NFLFROM PAGE 6

SOCCERFROM PAGE 5