Page 6 - The Behrend College Beacon - Thursday, April 15. 1999
Amid time of spiritual reawakening, students turn to peers for support
By Raymond Mccaffrey
Knight-Ridder Newspapers
COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo
There was a laundry lisi of reasons
why Randi Wilkerson drifted away
from church when she went to
college. First, she fell in with a wild
crowd that loved to party. Second, she
moved away from home, and her
Christian parents. But mainly, like
others her age, the 23-year-old
thought church wasn't cool.
“People think it's boring,’’
Wilkerson says. “That's why 1 was
rebelling. All the guys who went to
my church were dorks. I thought, ‘ls
this what I’m going to have to marry?’
I’d never been exposed to cool
Christian people.” The term “cool
Christians" might seem like an
oxymoron. But for many people
Wilkerson’s age, being Christian and
going to church is the hip thing to do.
College-age students are
undergoing a spiritual reawakening,
experts say, and in turn, churches are
scrambling to reach them. The result:
More and more poster children of the
so-called Generation Y, the
“millennium generation,” are dancing
away Friday nights at Christian
Michigan State’s frats to ban alcohol
By Peggy Walsh-Sarnecki
Knight-Ridder Newspapers
ANN ARBOR, Mich. - Michigan
State University fraternities are
voluntarily banning alcohol at house
parties after July 1. MSU is the only
university in Michigan where all the
fraternities on campus plan to ban
alcohol, university officials said
Tuesday. The idea is to put the focus
back on scholarship and brotherhood
instead of parties and drinking.
“It’s the beginning of a national
trend,” said Billy Molasso, director of
greek life. “Only a handful of
universities have taken this step.”
MSU’s ban was recommended by the
Alcohol Action Team, a coalition of
university, student and community
members working on ways to
discourage binge drinking.
MSU convened the coalition after
a May 1998 student riot following the
university’s decision to ban alcohol
at Munn Field, the students’ favorite
place for football game tailgate
parties. University officials stressed
the ban was voluntary.
Berkeley researchers sight first
known ‘spiral star’
By Chuck Squatriglia
Knight-Ridder Newspapers
BERKELEY, Calif. - Researchers at
UC-Berkeley have discovered a pair
of stars revolving in a celestial waltz
that leaves a pinwheeling tail of
cosmic dust in their wake. It is the
first known sighting of a spiral star,
and the findings, published
Wednesday in the journal Nature,
putting a new twist on the age-old
image of stars as dots in the heavens.
‘‘There is nothing that we know of
that looks like that,” said John
Monnier, a physics graduate student
and one of the three researchers
behind the discovery. “It’s extremely
exiting.” The star in question is
named Wolf-Rayet 104, and it is three
times larger and 100,000 times
brighter than the sun. Its distance
from Earth, 28 million billion miles,
shrouded the star in secrecy until
telescope technology pioneered last
year gave Monnier and his colleagues
the clearest view yet of Wolf-Rayet
104.
What they found shocked them.
Wolf-Rayet 104 appears not like a
disk or sphere, but a quotation mark
with a spiral “tail” of dust 18 billion
miles long. “When we first saw the
data coming in, we thought it was
something out of Star Trek,” said
research physicist Peter Tuthill. “It
didn't look real.”
The discovery offers insights into
the mechanics of stellar wind, which
blows the fundamental building
blocks of nature to the far corners of
the universe. And it may solve a riddle
that has long puzzled astronomers:
How can cosmic dust exist in an such
an inhospitable environment?
Wolf-Rayet 104 is buffeted by
socials and spending Sunday
mornings at worship services geared
to them
“It’s because churches are getting
a little bit more post-modern," says
Wilkerson, who’s part of Crossroads,
the college-age ministry at Pulpit
Rock Church in Colorado Springs.
"They’re not so traditional. That's
what drove me around," she says. “I
think people are getting involved
because they realize how fun it can
be and that people who are Christian
are not boring. They’re not dorks,”
says Wilkerson, a stock supervisor at
a Gap store.
The spiritual reawakening among
today’s college students also
constitutes a resurgence of the so
called Jesus movement on campuses,
which began in the late 1960 s and
proceeded through the ’ 70s, says Tom
Yeakley, director of The Navigators'
U.S. Campus Ministry, based in
Colorado Springs. But by the early
’Bos, campus ministries that once had
1,000 members were down to about
50.
“We saw a very spiritually
apathetic college student in
America,” Yeakley says. The decline
continued until 1994 when “we saw
“It wasn’t the president telling the
greeks what to do," said Kristen
Teetens, university spokeswoman. "It
was an action team recommendation
that the greeks took on." Beginning
in July, MSU’s fraternities and their
1,500 members will hold all parlies
with alcohol at restaurants or other
public sites, said Jason Rosenbaum,
Interfraternity Council president.
This means professional bartenders
and bouncers will take charge ol how
much students drink and try to prevent
underage drinking. Fraternity
members typically tend bar
themselves when parties are held in
their chapter houses. Professionals are
much more likely to maintain stricter
control, Molasso said.
Professionals are no guarantee,
however. MSU student Bradley
McCue died last November after
drinking 24 shots to celebrate his 21st
birthday. McCue was celebrating at
Rick’s American Cafe, an East
Lansing bar. Rick's was closed for 30
days as a result of McCue's death, a
spokesperson for the Michigan Liquor
Control Commission said.
stellar winds blowing at more than
620 miles per second. That wind
kicks up a lot of cosmic dust, and
scientists have long wondered why.
Many argue the immense radiation
cast by Wolf-Rayet stars would
incinerate everything in its path. "It
is a puzzle how the dust got there,”
Tuthill said. “That’s something
scientists have been throwing bread
rolls at each other over at conferences
for years.”
Tuthill and his colleagues
discovered Wolf-Rayet 104 is a
binary star, meaning it has a second,
smaller “twin” lurking nearby. The
researchers theorize stellar winds
blowing off the two stars collide,
creating a cocoon that protects the
dust from the stars’ radiation. “It's
like a snowflake between two blow
torches,” said lead researcher William
Danchi. “It’s amazing.”
The star’s spiral shape is created
as the stellar wind blows the dust
outward, much like a lawn sprinkler
sprays water in a circular pattern,
Danchi said. Danchi and his
colleagues continue searching for
other spiral stars to bolster their
theory, and so far they've found two.
They’re keeping mum on the details
until they have been published.
Danchi and his colleagues relied
upon the latest technology afforded
by the Keck 1 telescope in Hawaii,
the world’s largest optical telescope,
to make their discovery. Scientists
will be able to peer further into the
cosmos as the technology continues
to evolve, he said. “It is
revolutionizing our understanding of
stars we are seeing stars with
unexpected shapes and more complex
shapes than we ever expected,”
Danchi said.
National Campus News
an uptake again in spiritual hunger,"
Yeakley says. That spiritual hunger
was initially gauged by the individual
campus ministries and confirmed in
surveys The Navigators handed out
to more than 50,000 college students
in each of two years.
In the "80s. only 10 to 15 percent
of college students polled answered
"yes" or "maybe" to one or both of
the following questions: "Would you
like to be in Bible study?" and
“Would you like to talk to someone
about your spiritual life".’" Over the
past two years, 40 to 60 percent of
college students have answered yes
to at least one.
Jim Rottenborn. director of the
college and career ministry at
Woodmen Valley Chapel, witnessed
the boom in the si/.e of campus
ministries while he was working with
students at Miami University in Ohio.
“It just seems there's a definite
growing interest among students in
spiritual stuff," Rottenborn says. “In
'9l the biggest group on campus had
about 300 kids showing up. When I
left in '97, they had about 1.200
showing up."
Yeakley says he doesn't think
anyone really understands why
Members who are 21 and older will
still be able to drink in their rooms,
but alcohol will he banned Irom all
common areas for all members,
including those of legal drinking age.
Sororities have been alcohol-lree
since the 1080 s. Molasso said. "It's
going to promote safer living-learning
environments more conducive to
academics, and still allow members
to go out and have a good time,"
Rosenbaum said.
There are questions about whether
some fraternities will cheat on the ban
or whether it can be enlorced. A 1997
Harvard School ol Public Health
study on campus drinking found that
almost half of college men and about
one-third of college women binge
drink. Those numbers double lor
fraternity and sorority members.
Binge drinking is defined as live
drinks at one sitting for men anil four
for women. Nondrinkers suffer Irom
binge drinking through car accidents,
assaults and sexual abuse. About 75
percent to 90 percent of campus
violence is linked to drinking, the
Harvard study found.
Georgia
in bomb
College Press Exchange
STATESBORO. Ga (CPX) - Five
students at Georgia Southern
University were arrested alter they
allegedly tried to plant a bomb on
campus in an effort to divert attention
from their planned attempt to rob the
university's business office. Police
found out about the plot and managed
to dismantle the bomb hetore it
exploded. No erne was hurt, and
nothing was stolen during the April 7
incident.
Woodstock
jam in July
By David Hinckley
Knight-Ridder Newspapers
Bet on rain in Rome, N.Y.. the
weekend of July 23-25, because that’s
when Woodstock '99 will bring a
quarter-million people to the former
Griffiss Air Force Base to see artists
from Aerosmith to Rusted Root,
Willie Nelson to Metallica and Sheryl
Crow to Rage Against the Machine.
About three dozen artists will play
on two stages in all-day shows Friday
through Sunday, with jam sessions
from 1 or 2 a.m. till dawn. This
mirrors the 1969 and 1994 Woodstock
festivals, which became legends
despite heavy rain and gate-crashing.
John Scher, co-producer of this
year’s show and the ’94 show, says
“we’re confident” that gate-crashing
will be eliminated this time, in part
because a 12-foot "art wall” will go
up around the 250-acre site of the
there’s a spiritual reawakening “other
than God is at work again in the lives
of this generation of students.” That
would be Generation Y, which
according to Yeakley. consists of
those
born in 1980 or later, although some
gauge the starting point as 1982.
“This is the leading edge of
Generation Y, the millennium
generation," Yeakley says. They are
different than Generation X ...
They’re hungry spiritually.” The
common assumption is that the
booming economy in the ’Bos
prompted Generation X to focus on
getting high grades so they could “get
a good job and earn a lot of money,”
according to Yeakley. Church wasn’t
in the picture.
New methodologies are being used
to draw Generation Y to church. At
Woodmen Valley Chapel, for
instance, there’s a special Sunday
night service at which Rottenborn
focuses on a message from the Bible.
However, students lead the worship,
as well as gather to play games and
just hang out.
“It’s a lot more of a coffeehouse
atmosphere," Rottenborn says.
However, Rottenborn maintains that
“There are a number of things you
can do to promote responsible
behavior when it comes to the use ol
drugs and alcohol,” said Gregory
People, dean of students at Eastern
Michigan University, where alcohol at
fraternity houses is regulated, but not
banned. "Banning alcohol is
problematic, and I think that the
education and alcohol awareness is
probably a better way to go," he said.
Oakland University has one
fraternity house; Wayne State
University has two. The OU fraternity
can serve beer; liquor is allowed at
WSU’s. Those caught cheating on the
ban at MSU will face penalties,
Rosenbaum said, including
community service, fines or
suspension.
“Everyone won’t go along with it, I
will be the first to admit," Rosenbaum
said. “With any major change, there’s
going to be opposition, and you have
to deal with each situation
accordingly. It takes time to
implement this.” Six out ol 26
fraternities voted against the ban, but
all agreed to support it after the vote.
State students arrested for role
scheme
Undercover officers at the scene
arrested Michael T. Miller, Shane T.
McKevlin and Jason W. Guest shortly
after the trio allegedly put the bomb
inside an enclosure for garbage and
air-conditioning equipment just
outside the university’s recreation and
activities center. The three students
were charged with conspiracy to
commit burglary and possession of an
explosive device.
Police arrested two other students,
Matthew L. Foust, who didn’t help
plant the bomb, but whom police say
’99 will
festival. The site also will have an art
village, film festival, food courts, beer
gardens, ecology displays, video walls
and other features. The event will be
filmed and taped, with pay-per-view
likely.
Tickets for package trips go on sale
April 18, at Ticketmaster, and
individual tickets go on sale April 25.
Three-day admission plus camping is
$l5O, plus a $5 parking fee. Michael
Lang, co-creator of Woodstock in ’69,
says only 250,000 tickets will be sold.
Other scheduled artists include
Bush, Chemical Brothers, George
Clinton, Collective Soul, Counting
Crows, Creed, DMX, Everlast, Fatboy
Slim, Foo Fighters, Guster, Ice Cube,
Jewel, Korn, Limp Bizkit, Live, Los
Lobos, Moe, Alanis Morissette, Red
Hot Chili Peppers, Sugar Ray, Brian
Setzer, Offspring and Tragically Hip.
the most important part of his
ministry involves one-on-one
breakfast or lunch meetings with
students. “The idea is that I give time
to the oldest guys in the ministry so
that they can take on one or two
younger guys.” he says.
First Presbyterian Church has a
Sunday school class designed
expressly for college students. The
church also has students and adult
leaders who preside over on-campus
Bible study groups at Colorado
College and the Air Force Academy.
“I would say that’s a scriptural kind
of principle,” says Mark Epperson,
director of Young Adult Ministries at
First Presbyterian. “Jesus met people
where they were and that's why he
was so effective,” he says
On Friday nights, Pulpit Rock
Church hosts a social gathering for
college-age adults called “The
Merge.” On the last Friday of the
month the group engages in “The
Detour,” essentially an opportunity
to do something different, such as go
to places like Memorial Hall in
Manitou Springs and dance.
And Pulpit Rock is initiating a
regular Monday night service called
“The Gathering." aimed at providing
he said
Alcohol-free greek housing is a
small, but growing trend nationwide,
said Nancy Schulte of George Mason
University in Fairfax. Va. Last year,
Schulte led a national symposium on
campus alcohol practices for the
Inter-Association Task Force on
Alcohol and other Substance Abuse
Issues, a group of 22 higher education
associations.
"It’s not surprising to me that we
would see more groups starting to
make their own determinations that
they don’t want to be part of that
group that’s leading to fatalities, they
want to go back to their roots of
brotherhood," Schulte said. "And
what’s so nice about it is it’s not being
mandated,” Schulte said. “It’s coming
from within their groups, so it’s going
to stick. That’s where the campus
culture is changing."
The change will make partying
more expensive for fraternities.
""Obviously it’s more expensive to go
out and rent a banquet hall,"
Rosenbaum said. But he didn't expect
this to mean members would be
conspired to commit the burglary, and
Haley M. Berryman, who was
charged with hindering the
apprehension of a criminal because
investigators believe she destroyed
evidence.
The university has suspended all
five students, two of whom had part
time jobs as safety escorts with the
campus police department.
Investigators say more arrests are
possible. Campus police said they
learned about the plot after
intercepting electronic messages and
Arizona faculty may consider
warning labels for some courses
College Press Exchange
TUCSON, Ariz. (CPX) - Classes at
the University of Arizona could
eventually come with warning
labels. The idea stems from the
“Truth in Curriculum” bill recently
introduced to state legislators. The
proposal, tabled for this legislative
session, is to require faculty at all
public institutions to distribute
syllabi and give detailed descriptions
of topics that would be covered in
each course. It would allow students
to withdraw from courses without
penalty if they determine that that
they weren’t given accurate course
descriptions. The bill also would
prohibit instructors from requiring
students to purchase obscene
materials.
State Sen. David Petersen pushed
the idea after receiving a call from a
constituent who complained that her
a sense of community for "the post
modern generation, not necessarily
attracted to the services that we have
now,” according to Doug Otto, the
college pastor at Pulpit Rock Church.
“I think that’s why shows like
Seinfeld and Friends are so big,” Otto
says. “Their emphasis is community."
Otto maintains that members of that
generation “sense that there’s
something missing in their lives and
they’re willing to try new things.
“Hopefully one thing they find is
Christianity," he says.
However, in Otto's view, this
generation is looking for more than
just live music and trendy services.
They grew disillusioned with church
because of a perceived super! iciality.
These students grew "up seeing
maybe their parents attending church
and maybe they saw their parents
divorce," Otto says.
“I think one of the most important
qualities in their search is that they’re
looking for something authentic,"
Otto says. “They’re looking for
somebody who lives the same way
Monday as they did Sunday."
paying higher dues. Instead, he said,
the fraternities may end up throwing
fewer parties. A side benefit will be
increased revenues for East Lansing
banquet facilities, Rosenbaum said.
He estimated MSU’s fraternities and
sororities hold up to 400 parties each
semester.
MSU’s notoriety as the campus that
threw the biggest and wildest post
basketball riot has overshadowed the
fraternities' alcohol ban, university
officials said. Students rioted March
27. after the Spartans hist to Duke in
the basketball Final Four. The riot
frustrated many of those working to
curtail student drinking.
Molasso said the riot only made the
fraternities more convinced they need
to be leaders in promoting responsible
drinking. “If anything, it's going to
hasten some of the changes we're
making,” Molasso said. "We have the
benefit of being a very visible part of
the campus. When we do something
and do it right, other people will take
our lead."
telephone conversations hut didn’t
know that a bomb would be used until
a day before the incident.
The bomb, which investigators
believe was made at an oil-campus
apartment, was basically constructed
from a 2-liter, plastic bottle filled with
about 3 lbs. of gun powder. The bomb
had a primitive time delay, a (use
attached to the bottom of a lit
cigarette, and would have exploded
in five to seven minutes had it not
been defused.
daughter enrolled in a course,
"Women in Literature,” without
knowing it would include readings
by lesbian authors who discussed
female sexuality in explicit terms.
The student also was required to buy
books that featured several themes
focusing on homosexuality. When
the young woman dropped the
course, she was told she could not
recoup her tuition costs.
Less than a week after Petersen
introduced the bill. Interim Provost
Michael Gottfredson asked the
university’s Undergraduate Council,
made up of faculty members and
students, to consider the idea because
he said he thinks such decisions
should be left up to educators, not
legislators.