The Behrend beacon. (Erie, Pa.) 1998-current, November 17, 2006, Image 1

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    THE BEHREND BEACON
Friday, November 17, 2006
“We definitely feel the void without
him here. He was a likeable stu
dent and a good worker.”
-MISC member Mario Loretti on the
arrest of Jonathan Demerecz
Senior volleyball player Karla Murray
Athlete of the Week
•Karla Murray, who had 35 digs in three
matches in the EC AC Tournament, is this
week's Housing and Food Services Athlete
of the week.
Is the globe acutally getting warmer ?
•Chris Brown writes about global warming
and its affects on the environment and the
inconvenient truth
Mike Sharkey/ THE BEHREND BEACON
SAAC makes a whale of a cardboard display.
Ever heard The Sound of Settling!
• Janet Niedenberger writes about Death Cab
for Cutie and a recent concert that she
attended.
Contents
News.
Editorial..
Calendar..
Humor
Student Life
Sports
, s ; I Ii S.
Newsroom:
898-6488
Fax:
898-6019
E-mail: jahloos@psu.edu
Our offices are located down
stairs in the Reed Union
Building.
Improvements lead to higher tech fees
Behrend Information Technologies
Manager, Ron Hoffman. Behrend
Information Technology Support
Services Manager, Todd Say, and
Student Government Association
President, Meredith Straub, held a
meeting on Monday, November 13,
2006 to discuss the usage of the infor
mation technology fee that Behrend
students pay each year.
According to the College Board,
private and public universities raised
their tuition an average of six percent
for the current academic year.
Behrend has also just announced a
tuition increase for next year as well.
In addition to the tuition that students
pay, they are also responsible for cer
tain fees.
contributed photo
At Penn State, all students are
required to pay an information tech
nology fee and a student activities fee.
Research shows that in 1998, students
paid SIBO per year. All the money is
first handled by University Park and
then distributed to each of the differ-
Page X
ent campuses as seen appropriate.
"During the 1998-1999 school year,
Behrend received 55.5'/( of the funds
its students paid, or about SIOO per
student, while the other 44.5 U stayed
at University Park for what they call
Central Services," Hoffman stud.
Central Services are the technologies
available to all Penn State students.
These services include WebMail2.
Library Information Access System
(LIAS), eLion. and Angel.
The money that gets allocated to
Behrend is used for numerous things
that include computer upgrades, the
purchase of the students' pen drives,
help desk employee salaries, printing
services, and much more.
Since the 1998 school year, the
technology fee has increased approxi
mately $3O per year for all students.
At the same time, the percentage that
Behrend receives back each year has
declined dramatically.
Page J
Each year, Behrend still only receives
Behrend professor publishes anthology
Page 7
Dr. Baldwin is releasing an anthology entitled “An Anthology
of Colonial and Post Colonial Short Fiction’’
A Penn State Behrend Student Publication
\ A Jl i 9 would almost certainly require a
W if greater effort than v\lßHh3(ytj!£ title
the first time ”
INSIDE
By Lenny Smith
staff writer
The computer kiosk in Reed Union Building is one of die mans dungs dial kurus lundmg liom die iechnulogy Ice
about SIOO per student from the tech
nology fee they paid. In comparison
to the 55.5% Behrend received during
the 1998-1999 school year, the 1999-
2000 school year brought only 49.8%
of the funds back to Behrend. During
the 2005-2006 school year, students
paid S3BO in technology fees and
Behrend received only 29.5% of the
funds back. Again, this is about $lOO
per student brought back to Behrend;
this leaves S2BO per student at
University Park for Central Services.
With the addition of the REDC and
all its new technologies, and as more
and more computers need replace
ment in other areas of campus, many
students and staff have begun to won
der why the amount of money per stu
dent Behrend receives from the tech
contribuled photo
nology fee lias remained slagnanl for
the past eight years.
At the meeting that was held on
November 14. attendees were pre
sented with information about de
allocation and usage of the technolo
gy fee monies and watched a presen
tation on possible uses of that money
if the campus was to receive more
funds. Attendees then asked ipics
tions and made suggestions as to how
the new funds should be speni.
Suggestions included laptop supports
for the furniture in Winterereen. areas
for groups to work on presentations
without blocking other computers,
and more wireless opportunities.
Hoffman said he loved the input
and would like to sec changes to the
Behrend campus. However, in the
By Scott Muska
staff writer
One of Behrend’s professors has added a
new book to the collection of releases by Penn
State professors. Dr. Dean Baldwin has been
teaching at Penn State Behrend since 1975
and has published seven books as either the
editor or author.
Most recently, he has released an anthology
of British Colonial literature titled An
Anthology of Colonial and Post
Colonial Short Fiction which
will be used as a tool by profes
sors for English literature classes.
Baldwin’s teaching interests
involve both the short story and
British literature, so the publica
tion of this collection was obvi
ously a labor of love. When
asked specifically why he decid
ed to compile and publish this
book, Baldwin exclaimed joking
ly, “I was hoping to get rich! Well not really
but anytime you release a publication you
hope to sell a few copies '
He then went deeper into his motivations
and said that, “the book is aimed at the fact
that there are a lot of classes being taught in
colonial literature and not a definitive test an
instructor could use for a course like that."
As a matter of fact, one of these classes is
taught by Baldwin, and it is called Literature
and Empire, or English 182. “It’s a general
education class, so anyone can take it," said
Baldwin, hoping to get students enrolled and
“Becoming a repeat champion
ULLEY
U&RARY
-Ed Miseta, Lecturer in' Economics
on the woes of the Pittsburgh Steelers
“The book is aimed at the
. fact that there are a lot of
classes being taught in colo-
nial literature and not a
definitive test an instructor
could use for a course like
Vol. LI 11 No. XI
i ? ;no6
Mikr Sli.uU-y I 111 UI'IIKI.NI) HI ACON
foreseeable future. Belli end will not
iecei\e an mnease in ihe amount of
funds. Hoffman plans on taking the
to the Information
sueecstions
Technoloin Sen ices
I'niveisiiv I ’ark and hopes to see a
ehanee in Behrend's share of the tech -
noloas fee
If you ha\e sueeestions on how to
improve teclmoloeies on campus, you
can c-mail Ron HoH'man at
ronh<" psu.edu
Read more about what
lieltrend students think of the
'iechtiology Fee.
interested in the exceptional viewpoints that
came from the colonies of England in previ-
ous times
The anthology features short stories from
British colonies such as India, Africa. Ireland,
Canada. Australia. New Zealand, and the
Caribbean. Baldwin says that the book “has
stories that were written by people that had
first hand experience in the British Colonial
Enterprise."
The fact that the hook was even completed
and published is almost
hard to believe, since it
took Baldwin and his co
editor Patrick Quinn a
very lone time to com
plete the hook. "We con
sulted British publishers
and they turned us down,
except for Oxford, but
they wanted us to do all of
the permission work for
the book by ourselves.
Dr. Dean Baldwin
and they offered us a terrible contract.
Baldwin.
They ended up signing a contract with
United States publisher Houghton Mifflin and
then finally produced the book after five or
six years of hard work.
Baldwin's class could be a surefire way to
gain some credits for any student in need of
general education classes. A student can go
into the class know ing that their teacher will
be drawing from an anthology that he himself
edited and has a vast knowledge of.
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