Thursday, February 3, 2011Daily Heraldthe Brown

Since 1891vol. cxlvi, no. 7

33 / 22

t o m o r r o w

28 / 10

t o d aynews...................2-5editorial.............10opinions.............11City & state.......12insid

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city & state, 6

No bullyingR.i. officials, schools combat harassment, bullying

POst- plays in the slush, follows the white rabbit

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By Nicole BoucherNews editor

After an ordeal of several days, the two Brown students studying in Egypt have returned safely home. For the people and the state of Egypt, the ordeal continues.

Amanda Labora ’12 and Mi-chael Dawkins ’12 arrived back in the United States Tuesday after being evacuated from Alexandria, Egypt. They departed from Egypt along with the 20 other students studying abroad in Alexandria through a Middlebury College

program, ending more than a week of uncertainty after protests broke out Jan. 25 against President Hosni Mubarak.

“Egyptians have saved my life,” Labora said in a phone interview

Students safely home from Egypt

S n o w w h at ? o n wa r d, t o c l a S S

Freddy Lu / HeraldClasses continued to meet as snow turned to freezing rain yesterday.

Courtesy of Amanda LaboraA view from the lens of Amanda Labora ’12 Before evacuating Monday, two students studying abroad in Alexandria, Egypt witnessed the beginning of a popular uprising that has threatened to topple that country’s government.

By DaviD chuNgseNior staff writer

Disability Support Services will change its name to Student and Employee Accessibility Services at the end of the current academ-ic year in hopes of increasing its presence on campus, according to Catherine Axe, director of the of-fice. General misunderstanding of its services has prevented members of the Brown community from fully utilizing the office’s resources, Axe said at the Undergraduate Council of Students’ meeting last night.

The word ‘disability’ leads people to believe that only severe physical and psychological condi-tions merit use of the service, she said. Feedback from the commu-nity indicated that many people did not know the office welcomed in-dividuals in less serious situations.

The name has made the office less approachable to students, she

Disability services to change name By Joe rosales

seNior staff writer

With Mocha, Banner, the Critical Review and course preview pages filling laptop screens this shop-ping period, students continue to find themselves without a one-stop web destination when shopping classes. While administrators have expressed openness to centralizing the course selection process, there are currently no plans for creating an all-encompassing tool.

The freedom to explore a wide variety of course offerings is inte-gral to shopping period and the New Curriculum, but many stu-dents spend a significant amount of time navigating through various websites to build potential sched-ules, check space availability, read up on professors and glance at syl-labi.

Mocha was launched in 2006 by undergraduate students and im-mediately became a popular tool for planning shopping period. Through the website, students can experiment with potential sched-ules in an easily viewable format and compare Brown bookstore prices to Amazon’s for a course’s required and recommended texts.

But Mocha does not allow stu-dents to see if a course has space available or give them the ability to directly register for a course.

And because neither the Uni-versity nor Computing and In-formation Services supports the site, all of the course data must be gathered through “screen scrap-ing,” according to Christopher Keith, director of information technology. “They use a robot to generate — or to visit — the self-service pages to generate all the course information,” he said. This means Mocha’s information can be outdated.

Course Scheduler, a tool in Ban-ner, was launched in March 2010 to mixed reviews from the student body. The site imitates many of Mocha’s features, but because it is run through Banner, students can check course availability and regis-ter for courses directly. But, unlike Mocha — which allows students to compare new and used prices for textbooks sold at the Brown book-store and through Amazon — the tool only lists bookstore textbook prices, which tend to be higher than those on Amazon.

Online class shopping a complex endeavor

By amy cheNstaff writer

Kerrissa Heffernan summed up the scope of the Royce Fellowship for Sport and Society with the story of a simple trade. Ask a former child soldier to trade his gun for a soccer ball, she said, and “the kid would say okay … It’s powerful stuff.”

Heffernan, director of the fel-lowship and faculty engagement for the Swearer Center for Public Service, was referring to a research project on former child combatants. The study was conducted by for-mer fellow volleyball player Brianna Williamson ’11.

This summer, Williamson con-ducted research in northern Ugan-da with child soldiers who had been kidnapped in the war. Through in-terviews with both former child combatants and children who had not fought in the war, she studied whether soccer — an integral part of adolescent Ugandan culture — helps them reintegrate into society.

Williamson is a development studies concentrator, and her thesis

focusing on sports and develop-ment is inspired by her research. “Take what you’re passionate about and turn it in a way (that’s) usable to society,” she said.

She said she learned that sports have the potential to instigate so-cial change. “It’s inexpensive. It’s a phenomenal way to get people together. It has a wide base of sup-port to mobilize people,” she said.

‘sports across borders’The Royce fellows research and

promote awareness on the impor-tance of sports in the developing world. The goal of the program is for academics and athletics to in-tersect and flourish together, Hef-fernan said.

“Sports across borders have im-portance,” Heffernan said.

The fellowship was established in 2007 with support from Charles Royce ’61. It awards $4,000 to an undergraduate student for interna-tional and domestic research that examines the relationship between

Royce Fellowship aligns sports and academics

continued on page 4

continued on page 2

Labora ’12 and Dawkins ’12 recount journey

continued on page 5

continued on page 2

Ben Schreckinger, PresidentSydney Ember, Vice President

Matthew Burrows, TreasurerIsha Gulati, Secretary

The Brown Daily Herald (USPS 067.740) is an independent newspaper serving the Brown University community daily since 1891. It is published Monday through Fri-day during the academic year, excluding vacations, once during Commencement, once during Orientation and once in July by The Brown Daily Herald, Inc. Single copy free for each member of the community. POSTMASTER please send corrections to P.O. Box 2538, Providence, RI 02906. Periodicals postage paid at Providence, R.I. Subscription prices: $280 one year daily, $140 one semester daily. Copyright 2011 by The Brown Daily Herald, Inc. All rights reserved.

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Campus news2 the Brown Daily heraldthursday, February 3, 2011

You’ve Probably never Heard of it by Jonah Kagan ‘13ACROSS1 “That’s ___!”6 ‘Rents et al.9 Gypsy punk band

“___ Bordello”14 Photo tone15 Force to imbibe a

certain Smirnoff beverage

16 “Take ___!” (“Scram!”)

17 Clingy, in a way?19 Jordan’s neighbor20 Tupac, e.g., most

would agree21 Transformers

trilogy director22 Ancient lover of

Paris23 How things were

then, some say25 Turn ___ ear27 No longer hot?31 Big name in

baseball cards34 Cause of modern

wars, according to some

35 College sr.’s test36 Prefi x with cycle37 One who might

like things that are 17-, 27-, 46-, or 61-Across

41 They can be used to teach a Pokémon new moves

42 Not the sharpest43 “Dame ___

gasolina!” (Daddy Yankee lyric)

44 Arcade Fire, for one

46 Avant-garde51 Set consisting

of every integer doubled

52 Freestyle ski jumping event

56 Broke off58 It merged with the

WB59 Certain swab60 Crowded Chicken

Finger Friday times

61 Not generally liked

63 Water park slide64 Dessert often

eaten on 3/1465 Country singer

Carter66 Mucho

67 Unwanted one-night stand souvenir: Abbr.

68 Analyze, as oreDOWN

1 Helpers: Abbr.2 “8 Mile” actor

Phifer3 Drug some are

afraid they will test positive for after eating certain bagels

4 Finger-lickin’ candy?

5 Nom6 Cliché opera

word7 Adjective for a

heart in a song8 Came together9 Deep cuts10 Song in “Ferris

Bueller’s Day Off,” or its only lyrics

11 Common “Jersey Shore” incident

12 Depression-era migrant

13 Emulate a cholo, say

18 “Yeah, right”24 Bud pounder,

perhaps

25 Throw ___ (lose it)

26 Chip’s pal28 “All That Jazz”

director29 “It’s either you

___”30 Sticks around

to shelter a bird?

31 Sass32 Snake-like

Rock Type Pokémon

33 Like a ride one might exhibit, after having seen Xzibit

38 “My decision is to join you”

39 Jim’s wife on “The Offi ce” and others

40 Scar sound?45 Units of division

in high school47 Happenings48 Setting for

the climax of an attempted escape from the tyranny of an Egyptian dictator

49 Crashed between classes, say

50 “A _____’ clock scholar”

53 Bearer of the heavens, in myth

54 Tropical vine55 Result of an

overdramatic wound, perhaps

56 Abbr. on a business letter

57 It’s west of New York’s East Village

58 Meters per second per second, e.g.

61 FedEx rival62 Frenching

among friends, say

Solutions andarchive online at

acrosstobear.wordpress.com

Email: brownpuzzles@gmail.com

6:00 P.m.

Arial Sabar ’93 Lecture,

Brown-RISD Hillel

7:00 P.m.

“Got Money For Grad School?”

Smith-Buonanno 106

4:00 P.m.

Hip Hop vs. America — Unity Day,

Wilson Hall 102

10:30 P.m.

Funk Nite,

The Underground

SHARPE REFECTORY VERNEY-WOOLLEY DINING HALL

LUNCH

DINNER

Salt and Pepper Jerk Chicken, Creamy Parmesan Primavera, Pesto Pasta, Chocolate Oatmeal Squares

Pork Medallions in Portabello Sauce, Belgain Carrots, Vegan

Paella, Chocolate Oatmeal Squares

Hot Turkey Sandwich with Gravy, Baked Vegan Nuggets, Milk and White Chocolate Chip Cookies

Honey Mustard Chicken Sandwich, Vegetarian Pot Pie, Milk and White

Chocolate Chip Cookies

TODAY FEbRUARY 3 TOmORROW FEbRUARY 4

C R O S S W O R D

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“The interface isn’t as nice as Mocha, but it has a lot of poten-tial,” Paul Kernfeld ’12 said in a March 2010 Herald article. Be-cause Course Scheduler has CIS support, the course data is updated regularly. Course Scheduler also allows students a more detailed look into courses, such as course restrictions. The site links to other Brown sites like the Critical Re-view, which features professors’ ratings, and Course Preview, where students can view syllabi that professors have uploaded.

“I think a lot of the limitations now of why there’s not one central site has to do with the fact that the data currently isn’t available to outside developers,” Keith said.

But in the future, course in-formation may become available through an application program-ming interface — which could allow outside access to Banner’s data — according to both Keith and John Styer, director of enter-prise application services. Through the Course Metadata Application Program Interface Project, CIS is hoping to create a tool that would make it easier for developers to use Banner information, Keith said. CIS hopes to finish the project, which began at the end of last year, later this semester, Styer said.

The project is intended for the

use by department pages on the Brown website, but the data could be used to consolidate course shopping websites as well, Styer added.

Jenny Tsai ’14 said she uses nearly every website available to her — including MyCourses, Ama-zon and Gmail — when shopping classes. Tsai said she usually has “at least 12 Critical Reviews” open.

Tsai said a consolidated tool would ease a process she often finds stressful.

“They all have avenues that lead to each other, but it’s not one linear path,” she said.

Tara Noble ’12.5, on the other hand, said she uses Mocha “almost exclusively,” a habit she said she be-lieves most upperclassmen follow. While she said she understands why students would appreciate a website that combines multiple tools, for now she said she plans to stick with Mocha because it is “generally more cohesive.”

The administration under-stands the “modern trend” of wanting to bring features to one place, said Dean of the College Katherine Bergeron. “There’s a lot of good will and interest in align-ing forces.”

Lydia Yamaguchi / HeraldMocha is just one of the many tools students use for shopping period.

continued from page 1

sports and issues such as healthcare and education in the developing world. According to Heffernan, var-sity, club and intramural athletes are eligible for the fellowship.

The fellowship was proposed by Heffernan and Eli Wolff ’00, who is a visiting fellow in international studies and co-director of the fel-lowship. Wolff assists in designing the curriculum, planning seminars, advising and placing students in organizations and agencies. He also runs the Sport and Development Initiative at the Watson Institute for International Studies, which ex-amines the intersection of sports, development and human rights in global, domestic and local contexts. “Sport and development recognize that sports is not just physical ac-tivity or games,” he said. “It can be used to engage a community to help

with education, look at issues of equity and (address) issues of justice and respect.”

After returning from their sum-mer research, fellows attend semi-nars every other week and take part in conversations on related topics. The fellows also take part in forums with speakers and presentations during the semester.

Students were often surprised by what they learned from the fellow-ship, said Heffernan. “They would say, ‘I never knew I could do this. This is a whole new intellectual pur-suit. I can actually make a living out of this!’” she said.

Bridging the gapThe coordinators and students

agreed that bridging the separation between athletics and academics is a challenge.

Former fellow Matt Doyle ’10 GS founded the Brown chapter

of Right to Play, an international organization which brings games and sports to developing countries. Doyle conducted his project with Right to Play in New York City.

In his research, he assessed how high school and college students have used sports as a “platform for social change,” and suggested strategies on how to better involve students around projects in the sport-for-development movement, he wrote in an e-mail to The Herald.

“School administrations and teachers are failing to see the mul-tiple benefits that go along with sport and play, simply classifying this activity as recreation and not as a means of substantive education,” Doyle wrote.

To remedy this issue, attitudes need to change so that parents, edu-cators and students can see “sport as a catalyst for development,” he wrote.

Williamson also said that sport is more meaningful and powerful than is often acknowledged. “In academia, there is often a sepa-rate world from sports. Sports is a leisure … but it should be taken more seriously,” she said. As a re-sult, she said she believes that this fellowship will help to educate and bring awareness to people about the power of sports to make positive changes to society.

At the core, Heffernan said she believes that the community needs to have conversations about the role of athletics in academics.

“There is a real misconception about athletics,” she said. “It is more than to represent the furry bear.”

Fellowship joins athletics with academicscontinued from page 1

New interface may ease shopping

Campus news 3the Brown Daily heraldthursday, February 3, 2011

By JuliaN ezeNwaCoNtributiNg writer

Quitting smoking helps reduce symptoms of depression, according to a study by Christopher Kahler, professor of community health. The six-month study examined a group of people seeking treatment to help them quit smoking and was designed to assess how quitting affected their mood.

In follow-up appointments af-ter quitting, participants showed fewer signs of depression than they did at the beginning of the study when they were smoking, Kahler said. “The most successful people who quit and stayed quit throughout came in with very low depression symptoms,” he said. “If they went back to smoking, their depression symptoms went back up to where they were when they came in.”

The markers for depression in the study included mood and the presence of somatic symptoms,

Kahler wrote in an e-mail to The Herald.

Geraud Bablon ’14 said he started smoking when he moved to Paris in high school. He said the study sounded logical and very reasonable, but said smokers feel pleasure when smoking and a sense of community with others who smoke.

“I think that the general as-sumption from smokers is that they might be using their smok-ing to help them deal with stress and negative moods, but research that other people have done — and that this study shows — suggests that it’s not an effective way to deal with stress and depression,” Kahler said. He also said people tend to be more psychologically healthy when they quit smoking and are more successful. He said he hopes this finding will help people to quit by giving them hope that their mental health will improve.

“It gets better, and down the road, people tend to feel better

mentally and emotionally than they did when they started,” Kahler said.

Kahler said the results from the study match his findings from similar studies meant to mea-sure depression even though the participants had different back-grounds. In the current study, all participants were heavy drinkers but were not dependent on alcohol, Kahler said.

“We’ve done another study where we followed people for a year, and we saw very similar re-sults for people who were success-ful at quitting smoking, showing lower depression symptoms over time compared to the people that were not successful,” Kahler said.

“I’m sure there are many things that are happy about quitting, like not having to pay $7 a pack and not sitting out in the cold,” said Theresa Williams GS, who said she has been smoking for about 14 years. “I’ve been a smoker too long to pay attention to people’s studies.”

Study: Quit smoking, be happy

Despite enforcement, copyright violations steady in recent yearsBy KatheriNe loNg

CoNtributiNg writer

Despite increased University ef-forts to combat electronic piracy over the past decade, the num-ber of student violations has not changed significantly. The Uni-versity’s copyright infringement policy — enacted in July 2003 — has not led to decreased incidence of copyright violation, according to officials at Computing and In-formation Services and the Office of Student Life.

In the 2009-10 school year, there were 790 reported viola-tions, 95 percent of which were perpetrated by students. Those fig-ures have been more or less con-stant over the past several years, according to David Sherry, chief information security officer, and Michael Pickett, vice president for computing and information ser-vices and chief information officer.

Sherry receives notifications of copyright violation from organi-zations that represent copyright holders — for example, the Re-cording Industry Association of America and the Motion Picture Association of America — con-taining the Internet protocol ad-dress of the computer that com-mitted the violation. CIS then locates the user of the Internet Protocol address and blocks Inter-net access to that computer until the offending material has been

removed. But more notifications do not

necessarily mean more violations, Sherry said. One reason for the lack of correlation is that orga-nizations like the RIAA seem to step up efforts to curb piracy at certain universities selected ran-domly, leading to years of a single university receiving “thousands or tens of thousands” of notifications, Sherry said.

In a 2007 Herald article, an RIAA spokesperson stated that the group did not have a policy of targeting specific universities.

Organizations like the RIAA find copyright violators by using decoy sites called “honeypots” — which lure in people who intend to distribute copyright-violating material — and decoy IP address-es on established file-sharing sites.

“They also scour the Internet for open sources and file sharing,” Sherry said. “It’s not that hard to do.”

Sherry estimated that one-third of the notices he receives are from the RIAA, 20 percent are from the MPAA and 15 percent are from Peer Media Technolo-gies, which represents software companies.

First-time copyright violators receive a warning from the Office of Student Life. Second-time of-fenders must attend a hearing by the Peer Community Standards Board and usually have Internet

priviledges restricted for four weeks. Students who violate copy-right policies more than twice can have their Internet access banned for up to a semester and may face further disciplinary action, ac-cording to the University’s policy.

“It’s a huge hassle to have to go to the libraries or the CIT so often, but I’m getting around it,” said one student violator whose Internet access has been disabled since the start of the semester. The student, a junior, did not want to use his name when talking about copyright violations.

But his offense is not rare. “We don’t usually get these type of notices just for people who are downloading songs. We get them for people who are serving up material,” Pickett said. Pickett estimated that roughly two-thirds of the notifications his depart-ment receives are for students who distribute copyrighted material.

In 2008, the federal govern-ment amended the Higher Educa-tion Opportunity Act to require universities to have comprehen-sive programs to combat copy-right infringement. To comply with the new laws, Brown up-graded its program of techno-logical deterrents, education and institutional policies. CIS now uses bandwidth shaping — the delaying of certain types of data packets, such as those that would be used to illegally download ma-

terial — peer-to-peer protocols and firewall rules to block known websites that are used to down-load unauthorized copyrighted material.

Besides the increase in tech-nological and institutional deter-rents to copyright infringement, the University continues to focus its efforts on educating students about the potential consequences. CIS sent a campus-wide e-mail in September detailing the penal-ties for copyright infringement — which can include fines of up to $750 per illegally downloaded song in addition to campus pun-ishments. The e-mail suggested alternatives to illegal downloads, such as Hulu or Netflix.

The Office of Student Life also covers copyright infringement policies during orientation.

In a 2007 Herald article, Con-nie Sadler, then chief informa-tion security officer, emphasized outreach over punitive measures. “We really don’t have a sense about how much of this activity is common to students or whether there are some students who re-ally do think that anything they pull down from the Internet is fair game,” she said.

Sherry said CIS continues to grapple with that question. He noted that while the efficacy of the outreach measures was difficult to gauge, the number of violations has not increased.

But some means of possible copyright infringement are still gray areas — even for CIS offi-cials. Many students use Mojo, a free application that shares iTunes libraries with friends over the In-ternet.

“There’s no clean read on whether it’s legal or not,” Pickett said. He pointed out that while the application allows users to download songs that they have not purchased, iTunes includes a similar library-sharing feature.

Meanwhile, students continue to find ways to flout the copy-right policy. Samantha ’12, who received a warning her fresh-man year after she was caught downloading a Rihanna song on LimeWire, said she still down-loads music illegally. Samantha did not want her last name to appear in connection with the copyright violations.

“Any song that you want to download, you can search for it on Google with the word ‘down-load,’” she said. “It’s just as easy as downloading course content off (Online Course Reserves Access).” Samantha said that she has tried Mojo but that “it’s not the most efficient way to get music.”

“It’s kind of like a virus. The more you try to cure it, the more it evolves and becomes part of the cure,” she said. “As long as there’s music available online, people will try to download it.”

Campus news4 the Brown Daily heraldthursday, February 3, 2011

from her home in Miami. “They are in their streets, in their neighbor-hoods, defending the block.”

Labora said the situation is still very grave for the Egyptians. “No-body knew how serious this was,” Labora said. “If this had been anti-American, we would be dead.”

The protests against Mubarak’s regime were largely organized by Egyptian youth, even though government-controlled media in Egypt tried to pin the protests on the actions of the main opposition party, the Muslim Brotherhood, Labora said.

The uprising is a protest of the Egyptian people against Mubarak’s regime and the police state, with ordinary citizens coming together despite factors such as religious tension between Christians and Muslims, Labora said.

While demonstrations began Jan. 25, the largest protests came three days later.

“I just remember everyone praying on the streets,” she said. To pray, Muslims must take off their shoes. She said police were attempting to steal people’s shoes in order to hold off the protests. Christian women began to come forward and block the police from taking the shoes, she said.

“It was everyone taking care of each other,” Labora said. “People came together in extraordinary ways.”

She said that much of the pro-testing was peaceful and that “po-lice unleashed incredible displays of violence.”

At the onset of the protests, an evacuation of the students was not even discussed, Labora said, main-ly because the program directors initially believed the protests would be crushed due to the authoritarian nature of the Egyptian government.

Students were told not to travel

to Cairo following the beginning of the protests. Then classes were cancelled with the possibility of re-sumption the following week. The decision to evacuate came after the violence in Alexandria continued to spread, Labora said.

The police were targeting citi-zens who were not even involved in the protest, Labora said.

“An Egyptian woman in my dorm had been tear-gassed,” she said. “A girl on her way to an exam was clubbed.”

“The police in Egypt are abso-lutely horrible,” Dawkins said in a phone interview from New York City.

Preparing to evacuateWhen the decision to evacuate

came Saturday, all of the women in the program were brought to the large dorm where Labora lived, which security had left unguarded, Dawkins said.

Dawkins was at the market stocking up on food in preparation for a recently imposed government curfew when he got a call saying that the dorm where the men were staying was no longer considered safe. He was told all the American men in the program would be relo-cated to a program apartment until they could be evacuated Sunday.

“At night is when things got really volatile,” he said. Police sta-tions had been firebombed, and the police had largely retreated. Prisoners had escaped, stealing weapons from the stations.

“All night, you could hear ma-chine guns and screams,” he said. The Egyptians set up a neighbor-hood watch using implements such as bricks for weapons. “They pro-tected us,” he said.

Labora said she would never forget the conversation she and the other female American students had with a professor when they were being readied to evacuate.

The professor usually addressed the students in Modern Standard Arabic, a more academic form of Arabic not spoken on the streets. But when Labora asked him how he was doing, he responded in English. “Me? I don’t know. I’ve lost everything,” the professor said.

Delays and complicationsTo get to the airport Sunday

morning, the Middlebury program intended to take an armored car provided by HTH Worldwide, an insurance organization that Dawkins said is designed to pro-vide evacuations in the event of an emergency exactly like this — in which the police system is essen-tially dissolved. The drivers told the program coordinators they

were coming that morning, but the transportation did not show up. The service still reported to Nehad Heliel, director of the pro-gram, that the students had been retrieved.

The organization had been “ex-tremely reliable in the past, find-ing medication for our students in some strange corners of the world and organizing some very tough medevac scenarios for us, includ-ing one from Alexandria, some time ago,” wrote Michael Geisler, vice president for language schools, schools abroad and graduate pro-grams at Middlebury, in an e-mail to The Herald.

Dawkins said he does not know whether the service lied or picked up another group. Two program coordinators — Elizabeth Hunt-ley, a Middlebury alum who works for the study abroad program, and Shurouq Swaitti , who organizes schedules for the program’s par-ticipants — were able to track down and pay for a tour bus to bring the group to Borg el Arab airport, where they had been told an HTH-provided flight would evacuate them from the country to Athens Sunday afternoon.

But once there, the flight kept being postponed, and HTH went to Cairo first to pick up another group. Though the students real-ized they would not get a flight out of the airport Sunday night, Heliel told the students not to return to Alexandria, saying that the airport was likely the safest place to be at that point, Labora said. Dawkins said he found out eventually that the flight had gone back to Athens without ever going to Alexandria.

“We were starting to get really terrified that no one was going to get us,” Labora said. The students and coordinators were in contact with the U.S. State Department, but they were told they would need to go to Cairo to get a flight — even though there were looters attacking cars at that point, and curfew was approaching, Dawkins said. “I just

don’t have words to explain how that feels,” Labora said.

Labora said she noticed a large difference in the way the U.S. State Department dealt with the issue compared to other countries’ de-partments. For example, a Mexi-can student in the program got in touch with Mexico’s consulate, and they were arranging a private car to transport her to Cairo should the group not be able to fly out together, Labora said.

the evacuationMiddlebury began to consider

other options, including “a pos-sible evacuation by sea,” Geisler wrote. But they received word from Boston-based carrier Global Res-cue — run by a Middlebury alum — offering help.

“At this point, I had a hunch, based on the scarcity of informa-tion I was able to receive about how Plan A was proceeding, that maybe Plan A might not succeed,” he wrote. Through Global Rescue, Middlebury arranged a flight to Prague for Monday. Within three hours, security agents had arrived at the airport for the students’ pro-tection.

Once they arrived in Prague, the students were met by a U.S. embassy official, and plans for their arrival home were solidified.

Labora is currently home in Miami with her family. Dawkins is in New York City staying with a friend and hoping to return to Brown within the next few days to begin taking classes here this semester.

Dawkins said the situation is still very volatile in Egypt, but that in his appraisal, the Egyptians are persistent and will not settle for the current regime. “God bless them,” he said. “I support them completely in their goal.”

Labora also expressed support for the protests. “The U.S. govern-ment cannot waffle on this,” Labora said. “This is going to change the face of the Middle East.”

Courtesy of Amanda LaboraAmanda Labora ‘12 credited ordinary Egyptians, who set up roadblocks throughout Alexandria, with ensuring her safety.

After flight from Egypt, students return home via Praguecontinued from page 1

Courtesy of Amanda LaboraPolitical demonstrations spread to the streets of Egypt shortly after the government of Tunisia was overthrown by popular unrest last month.

Campus news 5the Brown Daily heraldthursday, February 3, 2011

said, and faculty members are re-luctant to suggest these services to students who may need them.

The office hopes to emphasize through the change that it also serves University employees, she said. Because the office is located within the Office of Student Life, many faculty and staff have misun-derstood the office’s role, believing that it only assists students. Em-ployee services have been offered for almost seven years, but Axe said she hopes the new name will make it “more inclusive for them.”

The office has been consider-ing a name change for two years, looking toward other institutions for ideas. The word “accessibility” is commonly used at other cam-puses, Axe said, and she hopes this broader label will encourage members of the Brown community to use its services.

The name change will come into

effect at the end of the semester, Axe said. The office will run for a year with a statement — “formerly Disability Support Services” — and the word “disability” will still be used on the website, directories and brochures to allow people searching for those services to be directed to the office. “It doesn’t hurt to exist in a couple of realms,” she said.

At the meeting, Axe also raised concerns over students who lock their bicycles to handrails. A blind student was recently injured out-side J. Walter Wilson due to a bike locked to the railing. Sayles Hall, the Olney-Margolies Athletic Cen-ter and the Office of Student Life are often affected by this issue as well, she said.

Ralanda Nelson ’12, chair of the student activities committee, said that students often place conve-nience ahead of other concerns. UCS plans to remind students to use bicycle racks.

Sophia Rabb / HeraldThe Undergraduate Council of Students discussed bike parking at its meeting yesterday.

UCS to remind students to use bike racks, not handrailscontinued from page 1

Ratty or V-Dub? We decide so you don’t have to.

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City & State6 the Brown Daily heraldthursday, February 3, 2011

By chiP leBovitzstaff writer

Cyberbullying prevention advo-cates are pressing forward with an attempt to present legislation in the Rhode Island General Assembly. Members of the Special Senate Commission on Cyberbullying and Cyberthreats are leading a series of town hall-style meetings with students and administrators before crafting the bill.

Sen. John Tassoni Jr., D-Smith-field and North Smithfield, chairs the commission, which was cre-ated as a part of General Assembly legislation last year.

“The goal of the committee is to find a way to stop bullying in Rhode Island,” Tassoni said. “That being said, we know as a commit-tee that we won’t be able to stop it wholeheartedly, but I know in my heart that we are going to put a dent in it.”

Other members of the commit-tee include Sen. Beatrice Lanzi, D-Cranston, Rhode Island State Police Superintendent Brendan Doherty, Rep. Deborah Ruggiero, D-Jamestown and Middletown, the chief judge of the Rhode Is-land Family Court and local high school principals and superinten-dents.

“I want to give the law enforce-ment and administration the tools they need to combat cyberbully-ing,” Tassoni said. The current committee plans to enact legisla-tion to curb the rise of cyberbully-ing, but specific details of the leg-islation are currently undecided,

Tassoni said. Tassoni has been working on

the issue of cyberbullying since 2005, when he passed the “first piece of legislation in the coun-try” on cyberbullying. A bill he sponsored in July 2008 defined cyberbullying as “textual, verbal or graphic harassment transmitted by computer, cell phone, telephone or other electronic device.”

Cyberbullying has remained prevalent since Tassoni’s first piece of legislation. According to a 2008 survey by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 50 per-cent of children between the ages of 10 and 17 have been exposed to cyberbullying.

The committee’s work has coin-cided with a recent development in a local cyberbullying case. A Smithfield High School sopho-more was charged with cyberstalk-ing after creating a Facebook pro-file under the name of a freshman girl and is set to appear before the Rhode Island Family Court. The profile featured the name “Halfa-foot,” a reference to the freshman’s deformed foot. The accused stu-dent’s actions would fall under the proposed new legislation, which, according to Tassoni, would not be age-specific.

Tassoni met with the state at-torney general, the education com-missioner and the state police to start ironing out details for the planned legislation on Jan. 31. The committee plans to file a final re-port to accompany the legislation this spring.

Lawrence Filippelli, assistant

superintendent of Scituate Public Schools and a member of the com-mittee, said he hopes the planned legislation will be a “balanced, comprehensive policy.”

“I hope the policy is able to have real consequences without criminalizing the issue for kids,” Filippelli said.

Filippelli’s first interaction with cyberbullying occurred six years ago when he was principal of Scituate Middle School. “I started seeing objectionable behavior in seventh and eighth graders on MySpace,” Filippelli said, “Parents had no clue what was going on.”

Filippelli joined the committee because he felt that the “time had come to address the problem all around,” adding that he wanted to be a voice of moderation. “I don’t want (the legislation) to be too burdensome,” he said. “Schools need to be able to review things on a case-by-case basis.”

Pilar Garcia-Brown ’11 said she would approve of efforts to target cyberbullying, which she called “downright cruel.”

Andrew Betzo ’11 said he was unimpressed by the legislation’s focus on the electronic aspect of bullying. Cyberbullying is just “the same old bullying,” he said. “Blam-ing the technology is just similar to blaming video games for violence.”

The commission is organizing meetings in the community to gain information and student and school administrator input, Tas-soni said. Meetings have already been held in Warwick, North Providence and Smithfield.

R.I. to combat cyberbullying

By elizaBeth carrstaff writer

In an effort to cope with a number of recent incidents, the Providence Public School District is reevalu-ating its bullying and harassment policy.

A revised policy encourages schools to investigate bullying cas-es more thoroughly, said Christina O’Reilly, facilitator of communi-cations and media relations for the school district.

“What we’re trying to avoid is really bumping students around without getting to the root of the problem,” O’Reilly said, referring to the district’s original policy to transfer misbehaving students to different schools.

“Maybe the child doing the bullying is being picked on by another student,” she said.

The new policy also addresses the relatively new issue of cy-berbullying. “When the policy was written five years ago, that was not a problem,” Randy Ross, equity and diversity specialist at Brown’s Education Alliance said. Ross added that cyberbullying can be difficult to handle because “a lot of it starts outside of school.”

The revision allows schools to intervene in cyberbullying cases if there is any “substantial disrup-tion” in a student’s life at school — for example, O’Reilly said, “if he or she feels intimidated, or stops attending a class.”

Another major change, O’Reilly said, is that the policy now targets harassment as well as bullying.

“It’s a bit of a legal distinc-tion, but it’s an important one,” Ross said. “Harassment is bully-ing behavior that is motivated by prejudice or bias against what are called protected classes.”

The Education Alliance has been working with the revising committee to create as compre-hensive a policy as possible. “They needed help in developing a policy that would put more teeth into the district,” Ross said. “They were finding from their own data — their own information — that in-cidents of bullying were escalating to violence because they were not being handled at a lower level.”

The new policy — which O’Reilly said was created with feedback from teachers and ad-ministrators — is expected to eliminate discrepancies in the way different schools react to in-fractions.

“We found that what was pun-ishable at one school was just be-ing counseled at another school,” O’Reilly said. The new system is flexible, she said, but it provides “a lot more guidance as to how you should proceed with a case.”

“The policy is a fantastic guide-post,” she said, “and now the pro-cedural work is being done on how to actually implement the policy.”

City schools shift attack on bullying

Read Post- magazineThursdays in The Herald

world & nation 7the Brown Daily heraldthursday, February 3, 2011

By richarD simoN, geralDiNe Baum aND aBigail sewell

Los aNgeLes times

WASHINGTON — Drifting snow and icy winds brought even the hardiest Midwesterners in Chicago and Kansas City to their knees Wednesday as two-thirds of the nation reeled from a winter storm of “historic proportions.”

Dubbed the “Blizzard of Oz” in Kansas, the storm coursed its way through the Midwest and Plains states — collapsing roofs, forc-ing highway and school closures, leaving tens of thousands without power and breaking snowfall and low-temperature records.

Airlines canceled about 6,300 flights Wednesday, according to the flight tracking service Flight-Aware.com. About one-third of the canceled flights were out of Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport, one of the nation’s busi-est hubs. Eighty-four flights were canceled at Los Angeles Interna-tional Airport.

At least two deaths were blamed on the weather. On Long Island a homeless man set himself on fire trying to stay warm and in Okla-homa a 20-year-old woman was killed while being pulled on a sled by a pick-up truck that crashed into metal poll.

By late Wednesday the blizzard — that pummeled Chicago with lightening, thunder and white-out conditions — had narrowed its path along northern New England and Upstate New York.

At its height, the storm had a following that more than rivaled Oprah’s on Twitter: the National Weather Service website that nor-mally gets 70 million hits a day was drawing up to 20 million an hour Wednesday.

At one point the weather ser-vice issued blizzard warnings for an area stretching from Okla-homa City to Detroit and wind-chill warnings from the Dakotas

to Texas, said Laura Furgione, the service’s deputy director. She compared the “massive storm” to the one that paralyzed Chicago in 1979 for more than a week.

Not only did 20.2 inches of snow and near-hurricane winds shutter Chicago schools and banks, it turned Lake Shore Drive into a snow-packed parking lot and kept people from so much as buying groceries or fixing an achy tooth. Denise Daly spent Wednesday morning canceling appointments at her dental of-fice, explaining, “Someone with a toothache can deal with it for a day as long as they have something for the pain.”

Although the snowfall had all but stopped Wednesday evening, it went down as the third worst storm in Chicago and set a record for cold at minus-40 degrees in parts of Montana. Oklahoma City’s 11.8 inches of snow set a new Feb-ruary one-day record.

President Barack Obama re-

ceived a telephone briefing on the federal response to the storm from Homeland Security secretary Janet Napolitano and FEMA adminis-trator Craig Fugate. FEMA had prepositioned power generators, blankets, cots, water, meals and other emergency supplies in places that were likely to suffer the most.

“It’s been a very snowy winter in general,” Forgone said. “It’s not over yet. We’re still expecting this cold air to remain over the central United States and even the Eastern seaboard. We are expecting more below normal temperatures at least through the next two weeks.”

For worried Super Bowl fans, predictions called for warmer temperatures by Sunday in Dal-las, where an unusually severe ice storm had driven the mercury below zero and prompted utility companies to orchestrate rolling blackouts across the city with the exception of Cowboy Stadium.

“It won’t be anywhere near as cold Sunday in Dallas as it is today

down there,” said Bruce Sullivan, a NWS meteorologist.

In New York City, the locals called it the “Groundhog Day Storm” as they gingerly negotiated icy sidewalks and Mayor Michael Bloomberg had an uplifting en-counter with the city’s most fa-mous groundhog, “Staten Island Chuck,” who, however improbably, predicted an early spring.

In Kansas City, Mo., Danny Rotert, an aide to Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, D-Mo., was hunkered down in his home, responding to questions via e-mail.

“The city is shut down and has declared an emergency,” he wrote. “...Even if I could shovel the drive-way to get out, my street would be impassable.”

Some motorists were stuck for hours in their vehicles on snow-clogged highways.

On Chicago’s Lake Shore Drive, nearly 1,000 cars were stranded overnight. Just before dawn Wednesday, firefighters walked down the line of snow-caked cars, shining flashlights inside to check on any motorists.

Joanna Moore, 24, and her boy-friend were returning home from the Downstream Casino Resort in Quapaw, Okla. when they got caught in a white out on Will Rog-ers Turnpike. They had two cups of hot chocolate and a muffin to tide them over between 9 a.m. and 8 p.m., when the National Guard found them.

They were among 16 people waiting out the storm at a Red Cross shelter set up in a local church. It was unclear when the

couple would be able to retrieve their car and get home. Moore said she was crossing her fingers that they would be there in time for her 3-year-old daughter’s birthday on Friday.

Meanwhile, officials began to prepare for an onslaught of insur-ance claims resulting from dam-aged properties like the Hard Rock Casino Hotel & Casino near Tulsa, Okla., where part of the roof caved in.

Wet snow and heavy ice caused roofs to cave in and buildings to collapse in several states. A gas station canopy plummeted in Long Island, an airplane hanger in Bos-ton, and an entire brick building in northwest Connecticut.

Even sunny Arizona didn’t escape freezing temperatures, prompting a warning from the Na-tional Weather Service for Phoenix residents to keep their plants and pets warm.

In Milan, N.H., Brad Ray, 72, who used to rescue people from avalanches for the park service in Mount Washington, wondered what all the fuss was about.

Yes, the snow was coming down there, he said, and they’d already had 12 inches of the white stuff.

No, Ray wasn’t rushing to plow his 1,325-foot driveway. “My plow truck is a pretty good size,” he said. “I have a lot of weight and chains on it. I don’t worry about pushing the snow.”

But even with all his equipment and know-how he still advised: “Listen to the professionals and don’t go out unless you really have to.”

Arctic winter storm puts Midwest in deep freeze

Orlando Sentinel Maps of North America compare a normal winter weather pattern to the this year’s, which has been colder and wetter than normal.

Antonio Perez / Chicago TribuneA woman crosses W. Grand Ave. at N. Milwaukee in Chicago, Ill. as snow plows wait for the streets light to change, Wednesday. There were 20.2 inches of snow at both O’Hare International and Midway airports Wednesday morning, making the Groundhog Day storm the third-largest in Chicago history, according to the weather service.

Jose M. Osorio / Chicago TribuneA person using snow shoes walks down W. Grand Avenue in Chicago as Edward Lawrence, center, and Catherine Longmire wait for a bus or taxi to arrive, Wednesday in Chicago, Ill.

By Nicole saNta cruzLos aNgeLes times

IRVINE, Calif. — More than 50 protesters — some with masking tape plastered over their mouths — rallied in front of the Orange County district attorney’s office Tuesday, objecting to subpoenas and a grand jury investigation that could lead to criminal charges against 11 University of California at Irvine students who disrupted a speech by the Israeli ambassador last year.

The Muslim Student Union, which denied planning to ob-struct the speech, was suspended by the university for one year. It was one of the first instances in recent memory where the school

recommended the ban of a student group for an action other than hazing or alcohol abuse.

Some have criticized the stu-dents’ method of protest, but the “Irvine 11” have gained wide-spread support from students, civil libertarians and religious leaders. A top UC Irvine admin-istrator said that university sanc-tions were sufficient and that the district attorney should stay out of the case.

The district attorney’s office declined to comment. The office has one year after the event to file charges.

“These students aren’t crimi-nals, they shouldn’t have their lives ruined by criminal charges at this point,” said Carol Sobel, an attorney who has worked with those named in the grand jury investigation and represents the other six students who were sub-poenaed. “And we should all move forward.”

The Feb. 8, 2010, incident sparked a debate about free speech at the campus after a group of students disrupted a speech by Michael Oren, the Israeli ambassa-dor to the U.S. Oren was shouted down repeatedly and supporters cheered as students were escorted away by police.

Erwin Chemerinsky, the dean

of UC Irvine’s law school, said the issue is not about free speech or expression but about appropriate punishment.

“I favor them being punished by the university because what

they did was wrong,” he said, add-ing that “university discipline is sufficient.” He said there is no First Amendment right to go into an event and keep it from happening.

Reem Salahi, an attorney who has represented the 11 students, said a handful of students have asked her about the implications of protesting.

“It’s very terrifying that stu-dents feel that they can’t even pro-test,” she said. “That goes against the very grain of democracy.”

At the protest Tuesday in Santa Ana, people held signs that read, “Don’t criminalize my classmates.”

Hamza Siddiqui, a UC Irvine senior and an organizer of the protest, worries about the long-term effect of criminal charges on the students, many of whom he considers close friends. Some are graduate students and potential medical students.

“These students are super bright kids and this has the pos-sibility of really messing up their futures,” he said.

Criminalizing protests like the one at UC Irvine could have a chilling effect on freedom of ex-pression and make such dissent unacceptable, Siddiqui said.

Sobel said the nation has a his-tory of heckling. Members of Con-gress stand up when the president is speaking, and in many of these instances, people are escorted away without criminal charges.

“It happens at City Council meetings all the time,” she said.

world & nation8 the Brown Daily heraldthursday, February 3, 2011

Protesters back UC Irvine students against grand jury probe

Mark Boster / Los Angeles TimesCollege students protest on Tuesday in front of the offices of the Orange County District Attorney in Santa Ana, Calif., against possible charges being brought against 11 students who interrupted a speech by Israeli ambassador Michael Oren at the University of California at Irvine last year.

By Kim murPhyLos aNgeLes times

In one of the most dramatic signs ever documented of how shrinking Arctic sea ice impacts polar bears, researchers at the U.S. Geological Survey in Alaska have tracked a female bear that swam nine days across the deep, frigid Beaufort Sea before reaching an ice floe 426 miles offshore.

The marathon swim came at a cost: With little food likely available once she arrived, the bear lost 22 percent of her body weight and her year-old female cub, who set off on the journey but did not survive, the researchers said.

“Our activity data suggests that she swam constantly for nine days, without any rest. Which is pretty incredible,” said George Durner, a USGS zoologist and a lead author of the study published in December in the journal Polar Biology.

“We have observed other long-distance swimming events. I don’t believe any of them have been as long in time and distance as what we observed with her,” he said. “How often does this happen? We’re trying to get a handle on that.”

Polar bears spend much of their waking lives on the shifting Arctic sea ice floes. They survive mainly on the ringed seals that are also dependent on sea ice and swim in abundance in the relatively shallow coastal waters of the continental shelf.

But sea ice has been melting dra-matically in recent years, forcing po-lar bears during the fall open-water periods to either forage from shore or swim longer distances in search of sea ice.

Bears that retreat to land usually find little or no food there, and “typi-cally … spend the duration fasting while they await the re-formation of ice needed to access and hunt seals,” according to a 2008 govern-ment study.

Conservation groups, the state of Alaska, the Alaska Oil and Gas Asso-ciation and several other groups are locked in litigation in Washington, D.C., over polar bear protections and how much needs to be done to slow the pace of climate change to prevent further shrinking of their habitat.

In November, the Obama ad-ministration designated more than 187,000 square miles along the north coast of Alaska as “critical habitat” for the polar bear, but since the fed-eral government considers the bears threatened, not endangered, there are no provisions to take dramatic steps to halt further deaths in the Beaufort and Chukchi seas.

But U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan ruled that the federal gov-ernment erred in its presumptive standard that bears must be in “im-minent” danger of extinction before being considered endangered. The parties are due back in court Feb. 23.

The difference between “threat-ened” and the more serious “endan-gered” status is crucial in this case. Attorneys for the Center for Bio-logical Diversity, Greenpeace and the Natural Resources Defense Council argue that an endangered finding will require the government to im-pose new controls on greenhouse

gases across the country to protect the bears.

In any case, they say, the bears are imperiled.

“They’re drowning and starving now, and all the scientific studies show an incredibly high likelihood of extinction of two-thirds of the world’s polar bears in the next 40 years … and that includes all the bears in Alaska,” said Kassie Siegel, who is arguing the case for the Cen-ter for Biological Diversity.

But Republican Alaska Gov. Sean Parnell, who is leading the charge against the Endangered Species Act protections, has said the critical-hab-itat designation will cost the state hundreds of millions of dollars in lost economic development and tax revenue.

Plans to develop major stockpiles of offshore oil and gas resources in the Beaufort and Chukchi seas are potentially threatened by the polar bear protection zones. Additional litigation is likely on the question of how much protection must be assured for polar bears before major new drilling can proceed.

Durner said it’s clear that polar bears are spending more time in open water, and possibly on land, looking for food. Researchers con-ducting aerial surveys of the Beau-fort and Chukchi seas for the Min-erals Management Service in 2005 found 10 polar bears swimming in open Arctic water, along with four bear carcasses floating in open water, apparently drowned.

“We speculate that mortalities due to offshore swimming during late-ice or mild-ice years may be an important and unaccounted source of natural mortality, given energetic demands placed on individual bears engaged in long-distance swim-ming,” that study said. “We further suggest that drowning-related deaths of polar bears may increase in the future if the observed trend of re-gression of pack ice and/or longer open-water periods continues.”

In the case of the marathon bear, whose swim began Aug. 26, 2008,

several miles east of Barrow, Alaska, researchers had captured the bear and fitted her with a GPS-equipped radio collar, along with body tem-perature monitoring equipment and motion sensors. She was recaptured on shore near the Canadian border Oct. 26.

“What we have for this bear is actually a very beautiful profile of data that is very rare for any sort of wildlife, including polar bears,” Durner said. “And it allowed us to tell a story about this animal, and what she did, and what sort of conditions she may have experienced.”

She appears to have swum in an arc north and then northeast from the Beaufort Sea coast for nine days before reaching an ice floe. “She was able to get on the surface of the sea ice for a couple of days and then she went swimming again for another day. So really, she swam for 10 days, but nine days of it was sequentially,” Durner said.

world & nation 9the Brown Daily heraldthursday, February 3, 2011

bb & Z | Cole Pruitt, Andrew Seiden, Valerie Hsiung and Dan Ricker

Dot Comic | Eshan Mitra and Brendan Hainline

CO M I C S

Polar bear’s trip sheds light on ice melt

Los Angeles Times / MCTMap of the Arctic Ocean in northern Alaska locating the trek of a polar bear that took several months to swim through the melted ice.

EPA moves to control perchlorate

By Neela BaNerJeetribuNe washiNgtoN bureau

WASHINGTON — The Environ-mental Protection Agency took steps Wednesday to control toxins in drinking water, including per-chlorate, a chemical thought to threaten the human thyroid that has contaminated hundreds of public water wells, mostly in California.

The agency also moved to set standards for 16 other toxic sub-stances that can invade water sup-plies and impair human health.

Perchlorate, a remnant of Cali-fornia’s manufacturing, aerospace and military bases, can inhibit thy-roid hormone production, espe-cially in fetuses and infants. That can lead to lower IQs and develop-mental delays, studies have shown.

Research by the Food and Drug Administration, among others, found perchlorate contamination in food and water in 45 states, and a small study in the Boston area found perchlorate in the breast milk of nursing mothers.

Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., hailed the EPA’s action, saying it was about time the government moved “to protect our families from perchlorate.”

“Exposure to perchlorate in drinking water is dangerous, espe-cially for pregnant women, infants and children,” said Boxer, chair-woman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee.

But Republicans on the commit-tee disputed the threat.

“EPA is has changed its position,” one senior Republican Senate staffer said. “That’s not good policy. Noth-ing new is being presented as far as the science goes.”

The George W. Bush-era EPA refused to regulate perchlorate, which occurs in nature but is also manmade.

In the past, industrial users of perchlorate commonly dumped it into unlined pits, from which it

leached into groundwater, scientists say. The most heavily affected areas have been California’s Los Angeles, Riverside, San Bernardino, Orange and Sacramento counties.

California law requires that perchlorate levels be below 6 parts per billion. It was unclear what the federal limit would be.

Late last year, a contaminated well in Barstow, Calif., had a level of 100 parts per billion.

After taking public comment, the EPA will issue a formal rule on perchlorate levels. The process could take two years, EPA Admin-istrator Lisa Jackson said.

Meanwhile, late Wednesday, congressional Republicans prepared to introduce legislation to prevent the EPA from regulating green-house gas emissions that scientists say contribute to global warming.

Rep. Fred Upton, R-Mich., chair-man of the House Energy and Com-merce Committee, and Sen. James Inhofe of Oklahoma, the ranking Republican on the Senate Environ-ment and Public Works Commit-tee, issued a draft of a measure that would strip the EPA of its ability to regulate greenhouse gas emissions under the Clean Air Act and to con-duct research into climate change.

The draft measure adds to a growing pile of bills by Republicans and some Democrats to hamstring the EPA on climate change.

Jackson said the cascade of pro-posed legislation has not persuad-ed the administration to change course. “The president’s advisers would advise him to veto any legis-lation that…would take away EPA’s greenhouse gas authority,” she said after testifying before the Senate en-vironment committee Wednesday. “Nothing has changed.”

The Obama administration, unable to get Congress to act on a climate bill, has been pushing the EPA to regulate emissions using its authority under a 2007 Supreme Court decision.

editorial & Letter10 the Brown Daily heraldthursday, February 3, 2011

L E T T E R TO T H E E D I TO R

C O R R E C T I O N S P O L I C YThe Brown Daily Herald is committed to providing the Brown University community with the most accurate information possible. Corrections may be submitted up to seven calendar days after publication.

C O M M E N TA R Y P O L I C YThe editorial is the majority opinion of the editorial page board of The Brown Daily Herald. The editorial viewpoint does not necessarily reflect the views of The Brown Daily Herald, Inc. Columns, letters and comics reflect the opinions of their authors only.

L E T T E R S T O T H E E D I T O R P O L I C YSend letters to letters@browndailyherald.com. Include a telephone number with all letters. The Herald reserves the right to edit all letters for length and clarity and cannot assure the publication of any letter. Please limit letters to 250 words. Under special circumstances writers may request anonymity, but no letter will be printed if the author’s identity is unknown to the editors. Announcements of events will not be printed.

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Alum supports continuing donut runTo the Editor:

It is with great pleasure that I read the article “DPS: No plans to halt Naked Donut Run.” As a three-year participant and one of the primary organizers during my time at Brown, I found the Naked Donut Run to be a truly fantastic “event.” I am proud to say that I par-ticipated and that the true spirit of the run — namely, to diffuse the stress, tension and craziness that comes along with finals — lives on!

During my runs, we often had contact with the Department of Public Safety, and the officers were never anything other than friendly and appreciative of the chance to choose the donut of their choice. In fact, at one time several DPS officers protected us from some librarians, who wanted us out.

It surprises me to find such a strange altercation took place last semester. However, I applaud the Uni-versity for upholding such a fun and long-lived tradi-tion; one that is much more fun, in my opinion, than the “SciLi Challenge,” which does have its merits.

To current Brunonians — take advantage of op-portunities such as the Naked Donut Run, because once you move on from the hallowed halls, these opportunities are few. And to those Brunonians now organizing and participating in the Naked Donut Run, don’t forget to properly thank the DPS officers and University staff with a delicious glazed donut the next time you run.

Lillian Ostrach ’07 mS’08

E D I TO R I A L CO M I C b y f r a n n y c h o i

“All night, you could hear machine guns and screams.”

— Michael Dawkins ’12

E D I TO R I A L

Following the passage last year of legislation beginning the process of ending the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy, many universities are now reconsidering their stance on the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps. In his State of the Union address, President Obama said, “I call on all our college campuses to open their doors to our military recruiters and ROTC.” Now, a committee chaired by Dean of the College Katherine Bergeron will study the possibility of bringing ROTC back to Brown.

Brown originally stripped ROTC of its academic status — effectively removing it from campus — due to anti-Vietnam War sentiment. Over the years, opposition to “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” replaced Vietnam as the justification for keeping ROTC away. Yet the University scarcely revisited its policy despite this inconsistency. The past few senior classes have gone in and out of the Van Wickle Gates without having seen a formal reevaluation of Brown’s stance on ROTC, while our military continues to fight in two wars overseas. We are pleased that the University will finally tackle this issue.

The committee should examine ROTC’s compatibility with Brown’s mission and sovereignty. While Vietnam was the driving force behind ROTC’s removal, issues such as “granting faculty status to military of-ficers” also played into the decision. Provost David Kertzer, in an e-mail to the editorial page board, further noted that “in the past, the faculty have voiced concerns” about the military’s requirements, like the one requiring the University to grant academic credit for ROTC classes. Furthermore, the military continues to deny transgendered people the chance to serve, which would keep ROTC at odds with Brown’s non-discrimination policy even after “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” ends.

We should consider potential benefits of having ROTC on campus as well. Attracting aspiring officers would bring an added dimension of diversity to campus. And bringing ROTC to Brown could help di-versify the program’s ranks, where the Northeast is underrepresented.

But it is unlikely that ROTC will return to Brown soon, no matter what the committee recommends. Diane Mazur, author of “A More Perfect Military” and law professor at the University of Florida, told the editorial page board that the military might not invest in a new ROTC program at a school like Brown. “If ROTC is going to increase its footprint at more expensive private universities,” Mazur said, “its tuition scholarships are going to be more expensive. And that doesn’t count the general overhead expense of establishing what is essentially a new academic department.”

Furthermore, the military would only establish ROTC at Brown if it saw sufficient student interest in the program. With so few Brunoni-ans participating in ROTC at Providence College in recent years, it is doubtful we would make an appealing location for a new detachment.

Whether or not the committee recommends allowing ROTC back on campus, we hope they insist the University take more seriously its accessibility to students who want to pursue a military career. We are heartened that Bergeron suggested “more convenient transportation to PC and the possibility for academic credit for ROTC courses” in an interview with The Herald last year. But as it stands, Brown-caliber students who hope to go into the armed forces have many more at-tractive options, like the military academies or schools where they can participate in ROTC without having to travel off campus.

This process will affect perceptions of Brown, regardless of what the final decision is. We hope all students will study the issue and join the debate over this important choice.

editorials are written by The herald’s editorial page board. Send comments to editorials@browndailyherald.com.

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Post- maGazineKate Doyle editor-in-Chief

Reconsidering ROTC

An article in Tuesday’s Herald (“Watson panel addresses Middle East protests,” Feb. 1) incorrectly attributed to panelist Melani Cammett, associate professor of political science and director of the Middle East studies program, the assertions that poverty catalyzed the protests in Egypt and Tunisia and that poverty in Tunisia is worse than in Egypt. Cammett believes that poverty is a “backdrop” for the Egyptian protests, she wrote in a follow-up e-mail to The Herald. Egypt is more impoverished than Tunisia. The Herald regrets the errors.

CO R R E C T I O N

opinions 11the Brown Daily heraldthursday, February 3, 2011

What comes to mind when you read my byline? What can you infer? If you’re an amateur etymologist, you might think me Italian or Persian or South Asian. My name is alphabetically superior, so perhaps you could deduce that I’ve lived a life of prima-cy — in fact, I was first in line for every for-ay outside my kindergarten classroom. But if you’ve ventured to read my past columns — or know me personally — reading “An-thony Badami” would undoubtedly sum-mon something else, a pastiche of images, a persona perhaps. On this very subject, the exalted Joyce Carol Oates once wrote that her “job at the university (was) to im-personate ‘Joyce Carol Oates’ ... this quasi-public self.”

I’m certainly not equating my meager output with Oates’s massive body of work, but I am trying to remark on a shared di-lemma we both endure. Whether I like it or not, every single word I’ve ever written for The Herald will be archived digitally until the end of the Internet. This means that each new column I produce can be weighed against the others. It means that I have a line of succession to worry about, and it means that I have to concern myself with the maintenance of a coherent and continuous quasi-public self that avoids tergiversating.

Most undergraduates experience a simi-

lar predicament. Whether it’s a lengthy the-sis or a short response paper, your identi-ty, to some extent, is contained in and ex-pressed by your academic writing. We may not like to admit it, but a professor’s evalu-ation of our academic work has some bear-ing on how we see ourselves as individuals, how we measure up to our own expecta-tions and the expectations of others.

But a lot of this stuff is largely self-im-posed. Most of my readership doesn’t check previous columns, and it would be unfair of

me to expect them to do so. Still, it gives me the fantods to read arguments I no longer hold, and I cringe every time I come across a clunky phrase or bloviated language. I’m deeply afraid that someone will dig up an old column, read it and write me off. Think about a previously graded paper you find discarded at the bottom of some junk box. Don’t you recoil slightly while reading it?

A part of me thinks it’s a symptom of American political culture. If a politi-cian renounces a previously held view, he or she is pejoratively referred to as a “flip-flopper” — hence the schizophrenic back-tracking we often see from cornered office-seekers. The 2004 election is the first exam-

ple that comes to mind, though President Obama, too, has endured his fair share of accusations of waffling. Indeed, the binary of American politics makes it difficult for one to have nuance at all, leaving ample space for demagogues and talking heads to speechify simple but resonant viewpoints.

Academia is not so different. When I think about great writers and professors, I see them as monolithic entities — huge, towering brains who transmit deep and en-during truths, and whose bodies of work

are undeviating and sacrosanct. I forget that they are mammals, capable of mistake and regret and readjustment, just like me.

But somewhere along the line, amid the professionalization which most undergrad-uates are forced to encounter, we lose this sense of humility and equivocation. It is definitely the job of the writer to anticipate the emotional and moral response of the reader, but it becomes highly problematic when this crafted persona starts to shape or overtake the real person. Something is lost in transmission, and the authentic voice slowly becomes a caricature, a grotesque shadow of its former self.

You do not need to read in between

these lines to discover how I think this ap-plies to me. When I read my previous pro-duction, I detect a person who really wants to impress the person on the receiving end. He can be dogmatic, preachy, dense, ab-struse and pontifical. But he can also be empathic and passionate, and, on rare oc-casion, even eloquent.

When all is said and done, and the dust begins to clear, a writer, whether politi-cal or poetic, desires fundamentally to be heard. She feels she has something to say, something with meaning, something with real value. But this message is obscured by insecurity and self-doubt. Instead of having faith in the substance of an idea, the writer relies on rhetorical flourish and intellectual rococo.

Even as I write these words, I somersault in my mind, thinking about your percep-tion and your opinion of me. And the more I think about that — trapped in a kind of meta-textual bind — the less I think about being true to the beating heart of what I’d actually like to say.

And this is the essence of the problem.Thus, I ask the reader, like the writer, to

have a little bit more patience and under-standing when examining and criticizing the views of her peers. These precious years are a time for growth and for error-making. Let’s not taint them with illusions of gran-deur or image.

Anthony Badami ’11 is a political theory concentrator from kansas City, Mo.

He can be reached at anthony_badami@brown.edu.

A skimpy little thing about a problem I’ve been having

When I first arrived at University College Dublin, the economic crisis had just put the Irish economy into a tailspin. The ra-dio projected that half of all construction workers would be laid off, the newspaper proclaimed financial Armageddon and the bars seemed filled with workers returning to their traditional comforts of alcohol and caustic humor. The university itself, how-ever, was gearing up for a storm. Even as a study abroad student, I received protest leaflets handed out in corridors and scat-tered around classrooms. I heard the ru-mors of class being cancelled because of the student protests.

What was the big issue? War? The cor-porations that had just bankrupted the Irish economy? No. The government was considering raising the college registration fee by a whopping 600 euros, which comes to around $1,000. Per year. For a three-year bachelor’s program. Note the careful use of the phrase “registration fee.” There’s no use of the taboo word tuition here. After all, allegations that the fees were tuition in disguise were part of what prompted thou-sands of students to take to the streets in protest.

It’s hard to describe how comical it is to be an American student talking with Euro-pean protesters about rioting over a $1,000 fee hike. Most striking of all is the sincer-ity of it. The rioters are not taking to the streets just because they think the govern-

ment will bend and save them a couple thousand dollars if they put enough pres-sure on it. They make signs that say, “Be-cause my daddy can’t pay” and “H.E. — Not just for the rich” and chant about how they refuse to have their education stolen, and they mean it. They sincerely believe that the principles of higher education are at stake. To an American student, they might as well be explaining the greater intricacies of making a cup of tea — something is lost in translation.

Ireland is not alone in the protesting. Austerity measures brought on by the fi-nancial crisis have dragged the issue of stu-

dent fees into the streets across Europe — protests occurred in Germany in 2009, and, just this December, over 50,000 British stu-dents rioted in London and even attacked a car carrying Prince Charles in their frustra-tion. If anything, it’s the U.S. that is alone in its tuition prices, not the Irish protestors.

This makes the money-grubbing prac-tices of American universities all the more painful to watch. They realize that Amer-ican parents’ willingness to pay for their children’s educations is generally some-

where between $30,000 and “astronomical,” and that this is not being properly maxi-mized by foreign universities. For exam-ple, the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, a part of Brown’s ever-popular Barcelona pro-gram, charges around 1,000 euros a year. Of course, they could get a lot more money out of American college students, and they know it. For international students, the rates soar to a mind-boggling 3,420 euros a year. You foreigners! Paying that much for college classes. Suckers, all of you.

It’s pretty much the same sad story all across Europe. Universities triple or qua-druple their domestic prices for non-EU

students, and American students drool over the low prices. Given the recent pol-icy changes, however, this story apparent-ly should have included American college administrators sniffling over their lost rev-enue. After all, while they’re abroad, stu-dents are generally living in the dorms of their host university, eating food from local groceries and paying that hiked-up tuition for the college classes their local universi-ty is providing. There’s not really any op-portunity for the home university to charge

their students, since they’re not really pro-viding anything aside from the occasional follow-up.

However, as Ethan Tobias ’12 points out (“Piracy abroad,” Jan. 26), Brown has be-come the latest in a line of universities to decide that this lack of opportunity is a non-issue. The University is now charging you the normal Brown tuition when you study abroad for follow-up calls and sim-plicity. Now students won’t be confused by fee bills that are suddenly thousands of dollars less than before. It’s also easier than ever to decide between study abroad pro-grams, because now, they will all require you to take out that second mortgage on your house.

The money-grubbing is embarrassing enough in its own right, but there’s evi-dence that it’s legitimately hurting students. The de facto increase in price was immedi-ately followed by a plunge in the number of undergraduates studying abroad to the lowest level ever recorded. The Office of International Programs likes to blame this on the recession, despite the fact that the number of students studying abroad fell by nearly 20 percent precisely in the semester that they implemented the policy and has since shown little sign of recovery. If the numbers are due to the policy change, the University’s greed is truly robbing its stu-dents of — as I can say from personal ex-perience — the opportunity of a lifetime.

Michelle Uhrick ’11 hates telling student protestors what college in the U.S. costs.

She can be reached at michelle_uhrick@brown.edu.

Study abroad drop: It’s not the recession

It’s pretty much the same sad story all across Europe: Universities triple or quadruple their domestic prices for

non-EU students, and American students drool over the low prices.

Whether it’s a lengthy thesis or a short response paper, your identity, to some extent, is contained in and

expressed by your academic writing.

ANTHONY BADAMIopinions columnist

BY MICHELLE UHRICkopinions columnist

Daily Heraldthe Brown

City & Statethursday, February 3, 2011

By Kat thorNtoNseNior staff writer

Although Rhode Island’s unem-ployment rate of 11.5 percent has remained the fifth highest in the country for the past 22 months, Brown has been able to keep its employment rate relatively stable.

Brown, one of the state’s top 10 largest employers, is a “significant economic engine,” said Marisa Quinn, vice president of public affairs and university relations.

Last year, Brown had to cut a total of 200 positions using early retirement options, layoffs and job reconfiguration.

But Quinn said Brown has been able to keep employees on the payroll because of careful project reviews. For example, the University had initially consid-ered constructing a new medical education building but instead decided to renovate existing fa-cilities, cutting the expected cost in half.

Quinn said Brown has been working in collaboration with Building Futures — a program that helps train economically dis-advantaged adults in Providence in the construction trade — on its building projects. “We un-derstand and appreciate the role we play in overall employment,” Quinn said.

Dining Services has also ad-justed in response to the eco-nomic downturn, wrote Ann Hoffman, director of adminis-tration for Dining Services, in an e-mail to The Herald. According to Hoffman, the job losses from last year had a “small impact” on the number of Dining Services employees.

But Hoffman said the division

has implemented various changes as a preventative measure. Last summer, Dining Services reduced the number of open hours at the Gate and transferred the Gate union employees to other eater-ies — notably Josiah’s, where they replaced a number of Johnson and Wales University student staff. “We’ve completed that transition now,” Hoffman added.

Student employment in Uni-versity-posted positions has “remained steady,” Quinn said, though she added that appli-cations for many jobs have in-creased. Quinn said this increase offers an insight into the econom-ic situation of students.

Despite the high unemploy-ment rate in the state, Thayer Street shops have not reported any significant downturn in stu-dent purchases. A salesperson at Berk’s Shoes and Clothing Store said its business remained “even with last year,” but that she had noticed more students using par-ents’ money instead of their own.

A salesperson at Details also said she had not noticed fewer student appearances at the store. The economic downturn is “hurt-ing everyone in some way or an-other,” she said, but added that the unemployment rate has not affected too many people’s shop-ping habits.

U. bucks unemployment trend

By aleJaNDro DauguetCoNtributiNg writer

Watch out Wriston Rising — Hal-loween could fall on Brown’s Hal-loweekend every year. That is, if a new bill permanently rescheduling Halloween to the last Saturday of October passes the state legislature.

Legislation recently introduced by State Rep. Donald Lally Jr., D-Narragansett, North Kingstown and South Kingstown, would make Halloween the last Saturday of the month, regardless of whether that day is Oct. 31.

According to a Jan. 29 Provi-dence Journal article, Lally intro-duced the bill after a constituent approached him about its potential impact on the state’s economy. He told the Journal he has not decided to support the proposal but wants it to be considered during the current session of the General Assembly.

The bill is the first in Rhode Is-land history to propose changing the date of Halloween, according to State Rep. Edith Ajello, D-Prov-idence.

“To the best of my knowledge, it’s brand new,” Ajello said.

When asked about how the bill fits into the General Assembly’s pri-orities, Ajello said it is simply one of the issues the state legislature considers.

“The Assembly ought to be able to chew gum and walk at the same time,” she said. “We are able to deal with a variety of issues. While some believe that this bill is not of the

highest priority, it still deserves to be addressed.”

Students expressed mixed opin-ions on the bill.

“I can see how the bill would benefit businesses and families,” Brisa Pena ’13 said.

Scheduling Halloween on Sat-urdays would also impact students’ Halloween revelry. Since Halloween will be on a Monday in 2011, the legislation could affect celebrations this year.

“Friday and Saturday nights are when Brown students go out,” Frank Muci ’14 said. “With Hal-loween on a weekend, there won’t be that extra night to party.”

Rachel Connor ’14 said she is unconvinced that devoting valuable time to this issue would outweigh the intended benefits.

“I think that (the General As-sembly) should spend more of their time and resources on other things than the date of Halloween,” she said.

While people might question the bill’s importance, the reason for introducing it is obvious, Ajello said.

“It would be better for school-children to be out on weekends rather than school nights,” she said. “The streets would be safer, and so would commuting. It could also start earlier since most people are home on the weekends.”

A hearing on the bill has yet to be scheduled, but will be posted two days in advance on the General Assembly website, Ajello said.

State considers date change for Halloween

Freddy Lu / HeraldDining services has adjusted eatery hours to cut costs and minimize layoffs.

S lu S h l i f e

Stephanie London / Herald Black ice and slush make for slippery treks on Wriston quadrangle.

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