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Third-year Clayton Ayers won his appeal to stay in the South Campus Residence Hall (SCRH) Monday, reversing a Housing decision to move him to a single in Maclean.
Ayers will still be on probation for allowing five students to walk through his first-floor Janotta House window in the SCRH last month.
The reversal comes in the wake of widespread student frustration at what supporters claimed was an overly harsh punishment for the infraction.
“I appreciated the opportunity to have a trial,” Ayers said.
Housing administrators declined to comment on the case.
The College students who climbed through the window on October 10 were all put on probation.
Ayers was initially banned from both the SCRH and the South Campus Dining hall, a decision which he immediately appealed.
Students in Ayers’ house signed petitions protesting the decision and organized students campus-wide through Facebook to call attention to the situation. Second-year Student Government representative Sohrab Kohli took up the issue as well, saying he had never seen an issue garner so much student support.
Others saw Ayers’ supporters as attempting to justify a decision that went against housing rules concerning window usage, sign-in policies, and common sense.
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Scanning and digitizing one book costs $60. Scanning and digitizing the University’s 7.7 million printed works would cost $462 million. A price as steep as that makes it easy to understand why the University of Chicago is not leading a digitizing initiative on its own.
The Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC), a group made of the U of C and all 11 members of the Big Ten Conference, made a deal with Google in 2007 to digitize the university’s libraries, but the project hasn’t been moving forward at the same lightning-quick speed as Google’s search engine.
Of the 12 member-schools, only two have sent in books. Indiana University has been sending in books since August 2008, while Penn State University has started this year.
“The aim of the CIC-Google collaboration on the Google Books project is to make library resources readily and widely accessible far more rapidly than individual libraries could do [it] on their own,” said Judith Nadler, director of the University of Chicago Library, in an e-mail, but did not comment on when the University would start sending its books to Google.
CIC Director Barbara Allen said the plans call for the University of Chicago to submit its South Asia collection for digitization.
“Library staff decides who moves the books, and which books. Google sends a large truck that fits 60,000 books. It sends them to Google,” Allen said. Each book spends approximately four weeks out of circulation.
Under the Google Books agreement, Google assumes all costs of scanning and shipping to their facilities; the universities just pay the cost of labor. If anything happens to the books in transit or at the facility, the agreement has provisions to compensate for the loss.
As universities drag their feet, Google faces another obstacle: copyright issues.
In October 2008, Google reached a $125-million settlement that will create a new copyright collective. Part of the agreement allows Google the exclusive rights to reprint orphaned books—books under copyright whose authors cannot be contacted—and articles until their authors reclaim them. University libraries tend to hold a significant number of orphaned books, according to an April 4, 2009 article in the New York Times.
Under the settlement, Google would hold the revenues from the ads on orphaned books. Universities participating in the digitization will be given access to the Google archives for some years, after which access will be sold to them.
Nothing in the agreement prohibits the CIC or individual universities from starting other digitization projects.
Despite the legal troubles for Google, the scanning continues, and the CIC is sticking with its agreement.
As technology improves in the near future, the CIC is preparing itself for a digital world. “I love the book. I depend on it as an object,” Allen said, but noted that, “to search and discover information, the digital world is much better.”
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Consuls from Germany, Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic, and Austria met at the I-House Wednesday to discuss their experiences of the end of Communist rule in the Soviet Bloc. The event, “With Immediate Effect: the Events of 1989 Revisted,” was part of the Center for International Studies’ special series on the revolutions of 1989.
“Twenty-five years ago, few would imagine that we would be here in Chicago with representatives from Germany, Hungary, Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Poland speaking freely about uniting Europe,” Hungary’s Istavan Mezei said.
The panel’s moderator, sociology professor Andreas Glaeser, said that while it is evident today that socialism did not work in Europe, for citizens of the Soviet Bloc, socialism “was forever until it was no more.”
The panelists agreed that, at the time, it seemed like the Soviet Union would never collapse and that the 1989 Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia was a miracle.
“The greatest lesson [from the revolution] was the disqualification of Communism as an acceptable form of society,” Marek Skolil of the Czech Republic said. “We are all better off. That’s why these events are needed to be discussed today.”
The Velvet Revolution, which took place in the winter of 1989, was the third largely bloodless revolution in the Soviet Bloc, following the election of the Solidarity Party in Poland and the reinvention of Hungary’s Communist party. The Soviet Union fell two years later, in 1991.
However, Robert Zischg of Austria said there is still inequality between the previously communist countries and Western Europe.
“The walls in the mind of the people have not come down yet. The acceptance of former Communist countries is not as high as it should be,” he said. “For many people of
Poland, Czech Republic, Hungary...who grew up with the challenge, it is in our minds, the division. This is what Communism has done to Europe.”
The idea that socialism was the only way to run a nation made Central and Eastern Europeans feel that Soviet rule would never end. That socialist ideology made a smooth return to capitalism impossible, Zischg said.
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President Robert Zimmer is almost a million dollar man.
According to tax records gathered by The Chronicle of Higher Education, Zimmer made $927,814 over the 2007–8 fiscal year, the most recent year for which data was available. The Chronicle published salaries and benefit packages from 419 colleges and universities as part of their annual report on academic salaries.
Zimmer was the 27th highest-paid president on the list, which included 22 executives making over a million dollars. The highest paid president was Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s Shirley Ann Jackson, who made $1,598,247.
While the average university president’s pay increased 6.5 percent since last year, Zimmer’s fell slightly. His salary got a slight bump of $2,000, but his benefits package fell from about $440,000 to $424,000.
University spokesman Jeremy Manier said that the package includes deferred compensation, or a part of Zimmer’s salary that he can only draw from sometime in the future.
“Many organizations offer such packages as a way to retain presidents, who have financial incentives to stay with the organization and ensure its success,” Manier said in an e-mail. Zimmer’s benefits do not include housing expenses from living in the President’s House on 59th Street and University Avenue.
The University pays Zimmer about as much as its peers do, below Northwestern and above MIT. Last year, Zimmer was the 15th best-paid president, below Yale’s president and above the University of Southern California’s.
The Chronicle’s report, which took its figures from tax forms filed by each university, cautioned that this year’s numbers were from before the recession hit, and many presidents took pay cuts, froze their salaries, or donated a portion of their pay to charities after the financial meltdown last fall.
Zimmer said last May that his pay would remain the same. “We won’t be cutting [presidential] personal pay,” he said. “Just like we’re not freezing salaries. But in all these cases, the amount available for salary increases won’t be what it has been.”
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The South Campus Café and Convenience (C-Store) is facing unexpectedly slow business this quarter, an administrator said, despite its location on the most densely populated block on campus. Few are visiting the store, due to poor visibility and competition from the all-you-can-eat South Campus Dining Hall yards away.
Richard Mason, director of operations and communications for housing and dining services, said it was still too early to accurately gauge the performance of the shop, but some employees doubted it could sustain such slow business.
“Not too many people even know that this store exists,” said a cashier at C-Store. The employee, who requested anonymity because she feared management would discipline her for speaking with the press, said weekends are slowest, and estimates that only 15 customers come through the café on a typical Sunday afternoon.
Mason confirmed the café was only generating 60 to 70 percent of the number of transactions that campus dining services had originally expected.
“If it becomes self-sustaining, that’ll be a success,” he said.
Mason said there is “more significant marketing to be done,” but there are no plans to alter hours, much less close the shop, he said.
Roger Parker, a supervisor at the C-Store, confirmed that business is slowest during the day. But he emphasized that peak hours come later in the evening, between 5 p.m. and midnight, and increased traffic means word is spreading.
“Every week we see a difference, and it’s usually almost full at midnight,” he said.
Parker said that C-Store averages 90 to 100 customers a day. But having worked at Bartlett’s Maroon Market, where he estimated as having over 300 transactions a day, Parker said there’s a long way to go.
C-Store only recently put signs outside advertising its presence, and its location has made it hard for students to find and access, according to employees. Though it is adjacent to the South Campus Residence Hall (SCRH), it’s located below ground level and the entrance that is closest to the dormitory is labeled an emergency exit. The main entrance is on the far side of the building, and there is no way to access the café from the attached dormitory.
“Even people that live in the dorm don’t know about us,” Parker said. “The Maroon Market was much busier. And it’s always full on Bar Night [hosted Wednesday nights by the fraternity Alpha Delta Phi].”
To address the issue of access between the SCRH and the C-Store, Parker pointed out a series of doors that had been propped open to allow access into the dormitory without needing to go outside. He said the University was working on a more permanent solution, in which students could use their ID cards to access the dormitory from the café.
Mason denied such a plan exists, citing security issues.
“It seriously compromises security to keep those doors open,” Mason said. “Security is something that overrules convenience.”
Although Mason and Parker attributed a lack of business to convenience issues, second-year Erin Britton, who lives in the SCRH, said that convenience is not an issue with the café. “People are really enjoying having something that’s convenient,” she said.
The main reason Britton doesn’t go to the convenience store more often, she said, is because the all-you-can-eat dining hall is so accessible. She said she’s been to the convenience store about once a week since the school year began. Because of the new, unlimited dining plans, many SCRH residents only go to the convenience store on a whim, Britton said.
“A lot more people are using the dining hall now, especially for breakfast,” she said. “Most of the time [I go to the café] I’m jonesing for some Ben and Jerry’s or something like that.”
Mason said that a larger number of customers than expected are going to the dining hall for lunch. “Some of the people that we thought might just grab a sandwich or a salad to go from the South Campus Café have instead gone to the dining hall,” he said.
Mason has proposed giving out coupons, coffee mugs, and other incentives for new customers. He said they would have more ideas after meeting with the campus dining advisory board, a group composed of Inter-House Council and Student Government representatives, next week.
Parker hypothesized that students might not know the shop had more than just standard café offerings. “When you walk by [and] you see ‘Ambassador,’ you see a coffee shop, you might not know we had a store down here,” he said.
Employees said the name featured at the shop, Ambassador Organics, is misleading. The name refers to a featured brand of coffee and tea, and not all products at the shop are organic.
Some of the slow business can be attributed to more mundane problems. “There was no heating for a while,” Parker said. “People just stopped coming back.”
But he’s optimistic that the shop will succeed in the long run. He said the C-Store does have student appeal, with comfortable seating and wireless internet that convenience stores like the Maroon Market lack. And there are no other viable alternatives south of the Midway—the nearest is a convenience store at 63rd Street.
“There’s no other store around here,” Parker said. “If you know about the store, it’s do or die.”
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The Cook County Hospital Board is developing plans to end inpatient care at Provident Hospital, which provides medical services to South Siders in need. If the plan moves forward, Provident would send its inpatients to local hospitals, like the University of Chicago Medical Center (UCMC), months after UCMC administrators proposed sending patients to Provident.
Provident, located on the northwest corner of Washington Park, would focus on outpatient and preventative care services if the plan, which faces strong opposition from the community, is approved.
The Board plans for local hospitals, including the University of Chicago Medical Center (UCMC), to take in Provident’s patients. If those hospitals aren’t able to accommodate the influx, Provident will retain its inpatient care.
Opponents of the plan believe the decision to transfer inpatients to the UCMC is unrealistic, given that the University had plans of its own to send patients to the nearby public hospital this summer. UCMC considered partially staffing and investing $20 million in Provident in June, the largest planned investment in the Urban Health Initiative.
The Initiative hopes to find permanent “medical homes” for South Side residents at community hospitals and clinics, freeing UCMC doctors to focus on more complicated cases.
“Many of the great medical centers around the country have affiliations with public hospitals, and we don’t,’’ Eric Whitaker, UCMC vice president for strategic affiliations, told Crain’s Chicago Business in June. “We see Provident as a key piece in making [the Urban Health Initiative] system a reality.’’
Cook County spokesman Chris Geovanis (AB ‘80, MD ‘84) said the South Side needs inpatient services. “The South Side has an increasing patient load that has nowhere else to go,” she said.
UCMC and Provident have two of the busiest emergency rooms in the South Side, and an attempt to relocate inpatients from Provident to the U of C could be disastrous, Geovanis said.
“The emergency room of Provident is the place where people who can’t get into the U of C, because they’re perpetually on bypass, go to get care,” she said.
Geovanis added that the Hospital Board sought further budget cuts by laying off front-line workers such as nurses and janitorial staff.
The Hospital Board was unavailable for comment, but Geovanis said public backlash has prompted the Board to reconsider its plan to end Provident Hospital’s inpatient care. The final plan will be sent to the Cook County Council for approval.
Provident is part of the Cook County Health and Hospital System (CCHHS), which provides medical services to more than five million residents of Cook County. CCHHS serves all Cook County residents regardless of insurance, economic status, or ability to pay. Its mission is to provide personalized care for all patients, especially those who are unable to receive care elsewhere.
University of Chicago spokesman John Easton said, “I know people are following the discussion closely, but I believe they aren’t going to be making a decision for awhile.”
Easton predicted that no real decisions or changes would be made until at least February of 2010.
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» October 30, 4:27 p.m.
A woman walking on 54th Street and Blackstone Avenue was held up by a man with a handgun who demanded her purse. The offender grabbed her purse and ran away. He was described as having a brown complexion, to be in his mid 20s, and six feet tall with short hair and black zip-up hoodie.
» October 30, 4:27 p.m.
A man and a woman were approached by two men on 62nd Street between Kenwood and Dorchester Avenues. The offenders argued with the man and then shot him in the right thigh. The suspects ran south on 62nd Street, where they were arrested by Chicago police officers.
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Front-page stories about suicide bombings and sectarian violence leave little room for accurate depictions of the Middle East in American newspapers, journalist Neil MacFarquhar said Thursday at the International House.
His talk, The Media Relations Department of Hizbollah Wishes You a Happy Birthday: Unexpected Encounters in the Changing Middle East, was based on MacFarquhar’s book of the same name. The title came from an e-mail he received from the political party while working in a Hizbollah-controlled area.
The event was co-sponsored by the Center for Middle Eastern Studies.
The book was written to address what MacFarquhar saw as a disconnect between American conceptions of the Middle East and what he experienced as a New York Times correspondent living and working in the Arab world. He described how the focus of foreign press bureaus is on violence and political turmoil, which leaves Americans without a clear picture of the day-to-day life of everyday Arabs.
“I had been in Saudi Arabia working on this story on USAID for months, and then there was an attack on an oil tanker, so I was pulled off what I was working on to go cover it,” he said. “Often the stories on the ground are overshadowed by these big headline events. Would I rather not have had to cover the 16th bombing in Saudi Arabia? Yes, but there was a bombing, there was violence, and I had to go cover that.”
MacFarquhar also listed several impediments to progressive change in the Middle East, including powerful secret police forces, government disregard of the law, and a lack of basic civil rights. “If you want to fight extremism, you must allow these rights to flourish,” he said.
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Edwin Hubble (S.B. ’10, Ph.D. ’17) got another chance to globetrot this summer thanks to fellow U of C alum and astronaut John Grunsfeld (S.M. ’84, Ph.D. ’88), who took Hubble’s championship basketball to space with him while he fixed the Hubble Space Telescope.
Grunsfeld was on the court at Ratner Athletics Center this Friday to replace the ball, which he had taken up to space as a tribute to the instrument’s inventor.
Led by the famed astrophysicist, the Maroons took the Big Ten basketball title in both 1908 and 1909. The basketball, which usually resides in Ratner, is from the 1909 championship game and stands in Ratner as a testament to Hubble’s athleticism and prestige at the University.
“It’s much more than a basketball. It’s an icon of science,” Grunsfeld said.
Hubble went on to become a Rhodes Scholar and eminent astronomer and astrophysicist.
For its stay in Ratner, Hubble’s basketball was stuffed with straw to preserve its spherical shape. But straw is a fire hazard in space, NASA said, so Grunsfeld had to find a way to remove it while keeping the ball’s skin intact. Grunsfeld made a small incision in the bottom of the ball and removed the straw through the small opening.
Grunsfeld said the Hubble Space Telescope, launched by NASA and the European Space Agency in 1990, revolutionized modern astronomy with data that helped determine the universe’s rate of expansion and produced the first direct images of planets beyond our own solar system. The telescope is much more effective than its terrestrial counterparts because the atmosphere interferes with the radiation emitted by cosmic phenomena, which Hubble uses to take its readings.
More importantly, Grunsfeld said, its pictures of space have helped us to learn more about our place in the cosmos. “Astronomy is the study that helps us answer fundamental questions,” he said. “Where did the material that we’re made of come from?”
“Hubble is the pinnacle tool” to answer these questions, Grunsfeld said.
Grunsfeld, who performed three of the repair mission’s five consecutive space walks this May, said his career path was influenced by his graduate experience at the U of C. “We’d pack up our whole labs and spend months on expeditions to remote places. That kind of expedition science is very much like space flight,” he said.
Grunsfeld also worked in an experimental physics program that built scientific instruments and then sent them to space. “All of these thought processes were tools that I was then able to apply to the Hubble,” he said.
Repeated Hubble repairs are necessary since the telescope has to withstand the harsh environment of space. “Cosmic radiation is not good for the electronics,” Grunsfeld said. “Some things just wear out and break.”
The repair mission also improved much of the telescope’s technology. Grunsfeld and the crew added new sensors and better cameras, so now “it’s 500 times more productive...we go up to repair it, but really to reinvent it,” Grunsfeld said.
Grunsfeld is working on future programs for NASA, helping decide whether to retire the shuttle Atlantis and use rockets with passenger capsules instead of shuttles.
Using rockets will allow astronauts and instruments to travel from Earth’s orbit into the far reaches of the solar system.
Grunsfeld said that even in his terrestrial life, he spends much of his time looking at the stars. “I’d love to live in space on the space station,” he said.
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Court Theatre is moving away from large-scale productions this season to help balance the budget in a difficult economic climate, but theater administrators said its relationship with the University may spare it from severe cuts felt throughout the business. The theater said it will find a healthy balance between financial and artistic concerns.
“Like all arts organizations, we were very cautious when budgeting this season,” said Heidi Thompson Saunders, general manager of Court Theatre. “But because of the University, we do not have those same concerns about the day-to-day budget that other theaters may have.”
In addition to providing performance space on campus, the University pays five percent of the theater’s operating budget, and half of the theater’s board is affiliated with the University. The rest of Court’s income comes from season subscriptions, ticket sales, donations, and arts foundations, Saunders said, but she added that subscription sales are lower than in past years.
In addition, drastic funding cuts to the Illinois Arts Council mean that Court is receiving substantially less overall funding this year.
Along with “minor cosmetic cuts to the budget,” Saunders said Court chose to produce shows with fewer performers this season. The Mystery of Irma Vep, starting November 12, features two actors, and The Year of Magical Thinking, starting January 14, has only one. Overall, Court will be using approximately half as many actors as last year.
Still, Saunders said Court “didn’t want to compromise on any of the artistic integrity of the shows. We wanted to create an interesting season with great plays and fewer actors.” Court often performs classic plays and musicals that are proven crowd-pleasers, as well as comedies and more intellectual plays. The theater won four Jeffs—Chicago’s version of the Tony—last month for its production of Caroline, or Change last fall.
“The only thing that was decided to be off the table this year was our musical, because it is a double cost with an orchestra and a cast,” said casting director Cree Rankin.
Although the season’s productions will be smaller, Rankin said Court would have put these shows on any year. Since the theater is fairly small—around 250 seats—ticket sales are less a consideration when choosing plays than keeping production costs down.
Despite not having felt the brunt of the recession, Rankin said tough budget challenges for the theater are on the horizon. “We haven’t really felt anything, but that doesn’t mean we still won’t have trouble down the road; it really takes about three years for the long impact to hit,” Rankin said. “There is a lot more anxiety about what might happen, for some people, than what is actually happening, although that is very bad for some as well.”
Court’s most recent play, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, played to a sold-out house during its last few weeks. According to Saunders, the play is a major attraction in Hyde Park because of its ties to the neighborhood.
“August Wilson wrote 10 plays about the African experience, and this was the only one about Chicago in the South Side, and we are a South Side theater,” she said.
Rankin said the play was cast as a larger production would be, auditioning well over 100 actors. “When you are thinking of doing a small show, it is so vital that you have really good people,” he said. “We wanted to make sure we had a strong cast.”
Rankin said he was “overjoyed” at Ma Rainey’s success. “It was a good indicator in a tenuous season,” he said.
Court’s upcoming production of The Mystery of Irma Vep will play like a larger show, with 25 costume changes. Rankin expects the production to be fun and bring new audience members to the Court. Although the plays are smaller, they were chosen with care. “We still offer aesthetic variety to our audience,” Rankin said.
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