National Campus News
Unionizing
by David Warsh
Chicago Tribune
April 24, 2000
The drive to unionize higher
education is coming to a boil. The
United Auto Workers last week
called a day-long strike at eight
campuses in California despite on
going contract negotiations. And
on Tuesday, April 25, an election
at New York University was to de
termine whether the UAW will rep
resent graduate assistants there.
It will be the first-ever union
election at a private university
and perhaps the starting gun for
many more organizing attempts.
Union representation of gradu
ate students has become common
enough at public universities in the
U.S. It exists in at least ten state
systems, including California,
New York, and Massachusetts
but state statutes considerably limit
the scope of collective bargaining.
The NYU election is the first to
proceed under federal law, which
could insert the UAW as a third
party into every potential issue of
academic judgement that exists be
tween students and their professors
from grades to assignments to
recommendations.
Whatever happens next, the
NYU episode will be a big testing
point for the U.S. system of higher
education.
The basic facts are simple. NYU
is a big, prosperous second- or
third-tier research university, orga
nized into 13 different schools. Of
NYU's 35,000 students, some
16,000 are undergraduates, another
16,000 are seeking masters and
professional degrees, and roughly
3,000 are Ph.D candidates.
Around 1,600 graduate students
serve as graduate assistants, help-
Rapist's conviction raises
questions about campus
safety laws
by Cornelia Grumman
Chicago Tribune
April 19, 2000
LINCOLN. Neb. Like leaving a sin
ister calling card, the man would rape
his victims the same distinctive way.
He hit tiny colleges, mostly in the Mid
west. He wore a dark ski mask. He
looked for young women sitting alone
in music rooms or computer labs. He
attacked from behind. When finished,
he told his victims to pray for him.
Sometimes he took their panties.
If not for the struggling screams of
one victim, luck, and maybe even a
fluke, the man a Nebraska jury con
victed last week of one of those as
saults, 38-year-old traveling comedian
Vinson Champ, might still be free.
Now, while authorities investigating
similar attacks decide how to proceed
with cases in their own jurisdictions,
Champ’s conviction raises questions
about whether recent campus safety
laws go far enough in preventing these
sorts of serial rampages.
While citing the difficulty of track
ing any serial criminal across a broad
geographical area, some authorities
speculate that schools’ traditional re
luctance to publicly disclose or share
details about campus crimes might
have inadvertently prolonged the spree
of assaults in 1996 and 1997.
“I wonder whether each of these in
dividual departments sort of looked at
those problems as just being germane
to their specific campus and didn’t
make the next connection that perhaps
there might be a person who might be
committing these crimes in a broader
geographical area,” said John King,
president of the International Associa
tion of Campus Law Enforcement Ad
ministrators.
Already colleges and universities
have come under fire for lax compli
ance with laws requiring greater report
ing about campus crimes. The Cam
pus Security Act of 1990 and its 1998
amendments require all colleges and
universities to report three years worth
of serious crimes and to keep a daily
log book for public inspection. But
conformity with that law, known as the
Jeanne Clery Act in honor of a 19-year
old student who was raped and mur
dered in her Lehigh University dorm
room in 1986, has been so negligible,
particularly among smaller schools,
higher education brings on battle
ing faculty members teach, grade
papers, and perform research.
They receive cash (up to $20,000
a year), free tuition (worth
$20,000), and a discount at the uni
versity book store. If they are
headed for a Ph.D (about half of
them), they typically spend two
“They need to un
derstand the word
‘ rat.' They're not
a \private univer
sity in the public
service. ’ They 're a
rat corporation in
the service of
scabs."
-Lisa Jessup,
UAW organizer for
student elections
years taking courses, then must
pass a qualifying exam and spend
three or more years to write a dis-
sertation
The nub of the matter is this: are
they students or employees?
The university says
assistanceships are a vital part of
students’ training, for teaching and
doing research are what the doc
torate is about (though of course
increasing numbers of Ph. D’s go
into industry or government work.)
Thus a research assistant becomes
a better researcher by doing re
search for her or his professor; a
teaching assistant learns to teach
that Congress this summer plans to start
enforcing it for the first time by with
holding significant amounts of student
aid to violators.
“College is big business today, and
they are afraid of losing funding in
alumni giving or enrollments,” said
Connie Clery, who, with her husband,
Howard, was instrumental in persuad
ing Congress to pass the bill in the wake
of their daughter’s death.
“So this is why there has been such
a tremendous cover-up situation;
they’re afraid to have the public know
there is so much crime."
Beginning July 1, schools that do not
report serious crimes to the federal De
partment of Education, and who do not
open their daily incident books to the
public within 48 hours of an incident,
will face penalties of $25,000 per vio
lation.
While students on campuses where
the masked rapist preyed generally said
they were quietly informed about the
attack shortly after the fact, news of the
incident rarely traveled far beyond
campus.
“If you’ve got that free flow of in
formation, the agencies can collabo
rate,” said Daniel Carter, vice president
of Security on Campus Inc., the non
profit campus security watchdog group
founded by the Clerys. “That’s the type
of thing that when they keep it quiet,
the public often isn’t the only people
left in the dark. Other
agencies also are left in the dark.”
That was true in other campus at
tacks that since have been linked ei
ther by DNA evidence or by character
istics of the attack. At Knox College
in Galesburg, 111., for example, news
of an attempted assault Feb. 9, 1997,
merited a brief mention in one
Galesburg weekly, though long after
the event.
“They [Knox officials] consider
themselves sort of an island and pri
vate,” said Norm Winick, editor of the
Zephyr independent weekly in
Galesburg. “When anything negative
happens they like to leave it as unre
ported as possible.”
Sgt. David Clague of the Galesburg
Police Dept, said no notice was put out
about the attack because “that’s just
usually our policy.”
Another nearly identical attack oc
curred the next day in a college music
room in Kenosha, Wis. A week later,
by teaching.
The students, at least those who
organized the affiliation campaign,
see it differently. They view them
selves as cogs in a system, a cap
tive pool of cheap labor, easily ex
ploited and neglected. They want
smaller workloads, bigger sti-
pends, paid health care, and subsi
dized housing.
The UAW agrees and has
quickly sought to link the gradu
ate student election to attempts to
force NYU to use union labor in
the construction of a new dorm, as
well as to negotiate a new contract
for the university’s clerical work
ers. Lisa Jessup, the UAW orga
nizer for student elections, told a
rally the other day, “They need to
understand the word ’rat.’ They’re
not a ‘private university in the pub
lic service.’ They’re a rat corpo
ration in the service of scabs.”
The regional director of the Na
tional Labor Relations Board sided
with the students who petitioned
for an election. Reversing 25 years
of precedent, Daniel Silverman
ruled earlier this month that NYU
students in fact were employees
and therefore entitled to vote on
whether to join the Autoworkers.
He cited an NLRB decision last
year that permitted interns and
residents at the Boston Medical
Center to organize.
NYU quickly appealed the case.
For one thing, the university ar
gued, the precedent was ill-ap
plied. Boston Medical house staff
spend 80 percent of their time car
ing for patients and just 20 percent
in lectures, conferences, and
classes, whereas NYU assistants
spend just 15 percent of their time
on their assistanceships and 85
percent on their own work.
There is little doubt that gradu-
Finding love, friendship on the World Wide Web,
, ’ ; : y-J ' V
by.AstaYtre
CampSs CoftWbweT -
UNC-Chapel Hill
April 23,2000-
CHAPE*. HILL, N.C. (TMS)
Michelle Scuba, a junior business
Major at the University of Nevada at
Las Vegas, and her boyfriend Huang,
who lives outside San Francisco, have
been together for almost a year.
They live far away from each other,
but talk cm the phone every day and
meet once a month. They are plan
ning to get married soon and talk
about having kids one day.
All of this having flowed from a
chance meeting not at school, in a bar,
or at a religious service but in a
havediseov- -
Irdd, aftdt now prefer, meeting new
friendsand significant others Without ■
leaving the safety of their homes,
where they can simply log on to the
to&rn**,- ' ‘ '
v Scuba said she preferred meeting
people online first because the pool
to those from was more diverse and
&>m a larger area.
people, goals. Users can talk about their fa
you exdude because of looks, and you vorite pets, discuss current global situ
she ationSi or meet a virtual tennis part-
‘'l have metpedple from all over ner or soul mate. Services such as
jhil’iywldi V * r matchmakeKcommdgotdates.com
Scubhalso rpaintainsthal couples are becoming more popular and more
start among students as well as
other teenagers and adults.
ship h&gsed Ign SCrong-comilrimtk»i*4{«:' Jodie Dominguez of Fort Lauder-
B* 4 :i;v * “ " Ha., runs the matchmaker.com
jihd'olii’right from the start: site,'which encourages users to com-
two more women reported separate
campus assaults, one in Rock Island,
111., and the other in nearby Davenport,
lowa. But it wasn’t until April that au
thorities in Galesburg started connect
ing the Knox attack with those on other
Midwestern campuses.
And Davenport authorities learned
that a similar rape had occurred in
Omaha only because two professors
from the respective colleges who were
friends happened to discuss the issue
one day. Only a few of the investigat
ing agencies reported details of the
crimes to a national database main
tained by the Federal Bureau of Inves
tigation.
“It’s much easier for police depart
ments in the same state to communi
cate than those across the nation,” said
Ross Rice, an FBI spokesman based in
Chicago.
The schools where Champ allegedly
found his victims were in small towns
ate students have been ill-treated
in recent years. The Yale “grade
strike” in 1995 when under
graduates’ grades were withheld
established that. The group at Yale
never sought an election, and since
then a cornucopia of benefits has
been made available to all gradu
ate students, not just paid assis
tants.
Meanwhile, unionization has
proceeded steadily in the public
universities, where state laws or
dinarily stop short of granting aca
demic unions the same sweeping
powers to bargain they would en
joy under federal law. When UAW
representation was won last year
in California after 16 years of try
ing, some 10,000 graduate assis
tants on eight campuses were
added to the union rolls. That
brought union membership to
30,000 of the estimated 100,000
graduate assistants nationwide.
It is possible to imagine all sorts
of unforeseen consequences if the
unionization of private universities
proceeds —or if it doesn’t. For
instance, students suddenly classi
fied as employees could find their
tuition benefits subject to taxation,
which is not the case so long as it
is described as financial aid. Then
again, universities could dispense
with graduate assistants altogether,
preferring to hire out-of-work
graduate students and post-docs as
“adjunct faculty” instead, thereby
dramatically restructuring the
Ph.d.
There are larger ramifications.
Eight years of labor-friendly ap
pointments by the Clinton admin
istration have made a difference in
the way labor laws are adminis
tered. There is the prospect of
more change if A 1 Gore is elected
president.
that a4l they have is communication,
and if they can hold on to'fhtrtf tills
good,” she said. > , !
There are chat rooms and dating
services for all kinds of interests and
within driving distance of his college
and club performances. From January
1996 until his eventual arrest in May
1997, the former Star Search contes
tant known for his Michael Jackson im
pression gave 80 performances in 17
states, according to his former Chicago
based agent.
Union College in Lincoln, which
was the focus of trial testimony over
the last week in a Lancaster County
courtroom, still does not open its daily
log books to the public, according to
Dean of Students Joe Parmele.
“I wasn’t aware we had to keep daily
incident reports,” he said.
At the University of Nebraska at
Omaha, it was the victim, Heidi Hess,
who first contacted the student news
paper to tell her story after she was as
saulted in a third-floor computer room
March 5,1997, her mother said.
Champ since has entered a plea of
no contest to first-degree sexual assault
April 28, 2000, The Behrend Beacon, page 7
Missouri
vandals
campus
by Alexandrea Ravenelle
Campus Correspondent
University of Missouri
April 19. 2000
COLUMBIA, Mo. (TMS) More
than a week after the historic Univer
sity of Missouri in Columbia columns
were vandalized with brown paint, the
University is still trying to repair the
damage.
Each of the six columns were van
dalized with an exclamation point or
a letter to spell out the word ''Bono!"
preceded by an upside-down excla
mation point.
The school is currently working
with a conservator who specializes in
sculpture and masonry restoration.
When the graffiti w-as first discovered,
the university’s campus facilities de
partment used graffiti remover with
limited success; the paint is fainter,
but still visible.
The plan is for the conservator to
University of Missouri officials are looking for the person or
people who spray-painted the letters “BONO!” on a series of
historic and prominent columns on campus.
plete detailed surveys abouttheirlikes
and dislikes and to “Go meet sorhe
body!” Dominguez followed that
command and met her husband of six
years there. The site ensures the pri-
Vacy of members by keeping them
anonymous.
Keeping user names a secret is de
signed to promote safety, which is a
concern for many using the Internet
to find promising partners.
Dominguez insists that with the addi
tional security, Internet dating isn’t
ahy more dangerous than trolling for
Mr. or Mrs. Right in a bar.
“At least with the matchmaker, you
charges stemming from that attack.
Champ was first suspected after an
incident three years ago in California.
After a student at Pasadena City Col
lege struggled and ran screaming from
an attempted sexual assault as she was
practicing piano, a witness followed the
masked suspect and took down his li
cense plate number. Campus investi
gators traced the plate to Champ’s
home in nearby Hollywood, where they
found clothes described by the victim
and a date book containing detailed
records of the comedian’s performance
schedule, according to Pasadena City
College Police Chief Phil Mullendore.
Mullendore then vaguely recalled re
cent postings to an Internet discussion
group for campus police having to do
with a string of rapes in the Midwest.
“Not being in the Midwest, I just
kind of ignored it,” he said. But some
of the elements of the crime sounded
similar, so Mullendore sent out a note
looking for
of prominent
sculpture
either repair the columns or experi
ment and give a solution according to
Phil Shocklee, associate director of
campus facilities. "I’m sure we’ll be
able to get it all out, but I’m sure it’ll
be a tedious process,” Shocklee said.
The biggest challenge is to repair
the porous limestone columns with
out leaving any evidence of the dam
age through a bleached or lightened
face of the stone. "We don't want the
image of a [bleached] white ‘Bono!’”
Shocklee said.
The columns are remnants of the
old Academic Building the first
building of the University which
burned in 1892. They now stand
alone in the center of the quad and
are believed to be the most photo
graphed item in the state of Missouri
with the exception of the Arch in St.
Louis.
Campus Police have yet to catch the
vandal and are not expected to be suc-
cessful
can prescreen the people," she
■ A Urhwntirrt, not exactly,
who has learned never to let-
guard when chatting online
people she doesn’t know very v
“After talking to someone
mately, you feel you know them, but
you have to be careful," shejuud,:
“They could be telling the truth or
they could be lying.” *
Scuba said she learned that the hard
way when she moved with her fam
ily to Las Vegas last year. She meld
man from the area online and invitid
him to go out for dinner or coffee.
When he arrived at her apartment,
Scuba said he sexually assaulted her.
Nowadays, Scuba said she
online friends with minimal personal
information while checking out their
Stories for consistency. She alto
thinks people should consider safely
when meeting someone through fee
Internet or in person.
“When meeting someone, no mat
ter how nice they sound or how long
you’ve been talking, you should be
careful,” she said. ‘Don't giveyotir
name, phone number, or address, and
never meet them alone.”
TMSARTWORK
That doesn’t mean the relationship
can’t get more personal with time.
Meredith Perry, a first-year student at
the University of North Carolina at
Chapel Hill, said she met one of her
best friends through an AOL news
letter designed for people wi th shared
movie interests.
"It seems like a weird way of meet
ing people, but I am glad we did,” she
said.
to group members. He also sent a de
scription of the crime to a national da
tabase maintained by the Federal Bu
reau of Investigation.
Within 24 hours, he received a flood
of responses.
Champ appeared in court this week
smartly dressed in double-breasted
suits and pressed white shirts. De
scribed as professional and articulate,
Champ would hardly stick out as an
obvious suspect by appearance alone.
Hunting for music rooms or computer
labs on college campuses, he could pass
easily as a graduate student or an in
structor.
“He was very neat and clean, and had
absolutely no accent,” Mullendore said.
“He bought skin whitener that he could
use to change the color of his hands, so
with no discernible accent and the abil
ity to change his skin color, a lot of his
victims thought he was white or His-
panic.”