University Activities Board to show movie Thursday at Wells Hall

The University Activities Board or UAB, will be presenting an advance screening of the upcoming thriller Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters at 8 p.m. Thursday Jan. 24 at Wells Hall.

Tickets are now available to be picked up at the UAB office in the MSU Union with a MSU student ID. Tickets are limited to two per person and seating will be limited for the event.

The movie takes a traditional children’s story and adds a twist with main characters Hansel and Gretel, played by Jeremy Renner and Gemma Arterton, traveling the world as bounty hunters, hunting witches.

The two siblings face a new kind of evil as the Blood Moon approaches, presenting new secrets about their past.

The R-rated movie is scheduled to be in theatres across the country Jan. 25.

CMU incident raises questions, concerns regarding campus safety

College students nervous about their safety following a reported abduction and sexual assault at Central Michigan University can do several things to protect themselves from similar situations, Sgt. Florene McGlothian-Taylor said.

Central Michigan University police said in an incident spanning Jan. 16 to Jan. 17, a Central Michigan student was abducted at gun point, sexually assaulted and escaped a house lit on fire by the suspect, according to media reports.

According to the reports, the student had been walking to her car in a university parking near the center of the Mt. Pleasant campus lot late Wednesday night when she was approached by prison parole Eric Ramsey, police said.

After forcing her inside her SUV he took her to the house where he and his mother lived and bound and raped her, reports said. He then returned the student to her car with two cans of gasoline and began driving.

She escaped by jumping from the moving car and making her way to a nearby house where the occupants locked themselves and the student in a bathroom and called 9-1-1, according to the reports. Ramsey took the opportunity to pour the gas around the house, light it on fire and leave. The fire was extinguished and the occupants and student escaped.

Ramsey later was fatally shot by police after hitting three police cars, according to reports.

“People should be aware of their surroundings at all times,” McGlothian-Taylor said.

She said students should avoid talking on cellphones as they walk because it could distract from what is happening around them.

Other safety tips included walking in well lit areas, walking assertively and going to areas with lots of people if you think you’re being followed.

She also said using the CATA bus service Night Owl and using State Walk, a service out of the MSU Library where students can be walked to on-campus locations by volunteers, can also be used to stay safe.

Council of Graduate Students to host charity event

The Council of Graduate Students or COGS, will be putting on a charity event, Welcome Back Social, this upcoming Thursday Jan. 17. at Dublin Square, 327 Abbot Road.

The event runs from 7 to 11 p.m. with 10 percent of the proceeds going to Ele’s Place,, located at 1145 W. Oakland Ave., in Lansing.

“It is what we call a welcome back social, so COGS is collaborating with some of the other professional student organizations and student governance groups,” COGS President Stefan Fletcher said. “… It’s a charity event social so the proceeds from the event will go to benefit Ele’s Place.”

The event is open to all graduate students plus their friends and family, with free appetizers, discounted drinks and live music.

COGS will be cosponsoring the event with the Council of Medical Students.

Ele’s Place helps children between the ages of three and 18 deal with the loss of a parent,
sibling or family friend. They help support grieving children through peer groups and other healing mechanisms.

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Although President Barack Obama and his administration might say they are pro-infrastructure development, it seems that the sky is literally the limit.

The White House issued an official statement last week, responding to a petition with more than 34,000 signatures calling for the administration to secure resources and funding and begin construction of a “Death Star” by 2016. The petition argues the Death Star should be created so “the government can spur job creation in the fields of construction, engineering, space exploration, and more, and strengthen our national defense.”

For those who do not know, the Death Star is an infamous space station in George Lucas’s “Star Wars” series able to destroy spaceships and planets with one blast of its laser.

The United States might have the highest-spending defense budget in the world, but the Obama administration wasn’t on board for its own Death Star.

Paul Shawcross, the chief of the science and space branch at the White House Office of Management and Budget, wrote on behalf of the administration and cited the $850 quadrillion construction cost of the Death Star as part of its reasoning for not going forward with its development.

“The Administration does not support blowing up planets,” Shawcross wrote.

The White House said it would respond to any petitions with more than 25,000 signatures when it set up its petition website.

Though most of the statement was cheeky and in good humor, Shawcross did remind readers that the United States already has a space station — the International Space Station — that orbits the Earth with six astronauts from three countries, including the United States.

Eli Broad spotted in TMZ video with L.A. mayor

While scanning the TMZ website, most students expect to see videos of the Justin Bieber, Taylor Swift or the Kardashians and the latest scandal they’re associated with — rarely do they stumble upon MSU figureheads such as Eli Broad.

After Charlie Sheen tweeted a photo of himself and L.A. mayor Antonio Villaraigosa partying in Baja California, Mexico, the mayor used Broad as a pawn to avoid a TMZ reporter’s question about he and Sheen’s alleged night together.

“Charlie said you didn’t really party for hours,” the reporter said to the mayor, who looked uncomfortable with the reporter’s topic.

“All I can tell you is, I don’t have anything else to say about that,” Villaraigosa said before putting his arm around Broad and simultaneously dodging the question, TMZ’s video showed. “I do want to talk about this, though. … We paid them to come and they came. Want to take a picture with me?”

The MSU alumnus, who played no part in the Charlie Sheen controversy, was with Villaraigosa for a ceremony celebrating the start of another art museum under his name, which will be one of roughly 500 museums and galleries he and his wife Edythe have created worldwide, according to the Broad Art Foundation website.

According to artdaily.org, the museum is set to open in 2014 and will serve as the headquarters for the Broad Art Foundation.

Unique creature focus of MSU professor's research

It’s common for many to think of MSU and jump to cows, horses, pigs -— any type of animal research — as an area of the university’s expertise.

But, some might be surprised to hear MSU’s knowledge expands far beyond the barn fence and into the African Savannah.

And we aren’t talking elephants or cheetahs, something standard: We are talking hyenas.

Hyenas, the Lion King-associated laughing creature, are world-recognized zoology professor Kay Holekamp’s area of expertise.

According to an MSU press release, Holekamp recently was named a fellow by the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Holekamp received the recognition for her work about animal behavior and hyenas.

Holekamp and her colleagues perform tests that involve calculating an animal’s intelligence by testing their ability to problem solve, she said. Holekamp also said the researchers give the animal, for instance a hyena, a puzzle box and observe them attempting to open the box.

“We have several lines of research going on at the moment,” Holekamp said in the press release. “One that is of particular interest to a lot of people is work we are doing on the evolution of intelligence and cognition in animals.”

California legislator pushing for drastically lower college costs

A California state legislator is the latest to push a new bill to reduce the cost of a public university bachelor’s degree.

Republican Assemblyman Dan Logue proposed a new bill that would help California natives earn a bachelor’s degree at no more than $10,000.

California is not the first to suggest these new cheap college education programs. Florida Republican Gov. Rick Scott is urging state colleges to design some form of $10,000 bachelors degree while Texas is already in the process of creating cheaper ways to earn a
college degree.

The proposed legislation in California would include high school advanced placement courses and enroll full-time at a community college after high school graduation. The student would be able to transfer up to 60 credits to a state university afterwords.

There are no current signs of Michigan adapting any similar strategy to help teens continue their education at the college level. Michigan high schools do offer advanced placement classes to help students get a leg up on college credits without having to spend money on the college courses.

According to MSU’s official website, an in-state MSU student taking 15 credits per semester on average pays $12,674 per year with an extra $8,526 for a meal plan and housing. Out-of-state students can pay as much as $40,000 per year and International students averaging just over
$47,000.

According to CollegeStats.org, MSU currently ranks middle of the road for in-state tuition compared to other Michigan colleges.

Higher education at top of agenda for state legislatures, according to report

A recent article published by The Chronicle of Higher Education outlined how higher education will remain a priority for state legislatures. The article highlights how a stagnant economy and political polarization might keep public universities from receiving an increase in funding, after many states, including Michigan, saw decreased funding during the economic recession. The lack of funding caused tuition increases for many universities, including MSU.

The rising costs of Medicaid and elementary and secondary education, coupled with an economy growing at a slower rate this year than the previous fiscal year, have caused lower appropriations for public universities.

After receiving significant cuts, MSU’s state funding increased for the 2012-13 fiscal year, receiving a gross appropriation of about $298,733,800, compared to $283,685,200. But funding did not increase enough to keep the MSU Board of Trustees from approving a 3.5 percent tuition increase for in-state students and a 5 percent increase for out-of-state students for this academic year.

I recently wrote an article that detailed MSU’s placement on Kiplinger’s Personal Finance Magazine’s top 100 best values in public colleges list. The university placed 46th for in-state value and 66th for out-of-state value.

Both Val Meyers, associate director of the MSU Office of Financial Aid, and Marc Wojno, Kiplinger senior associate editor, said that significant cuts from state funding can have an impact on a university’s value.

“The fact that we’ve been going through a recession and we’re slowly recovering from it, the cost of attending universities aren’t really seeing (financial relief) transfer to them,” Wojno said. “States still are cutting appropriations to state colleges, and in response schools have been bumping up costs.”

Meyers said the change in state funding during the past five years has had a significant impact on how MSU allocates funds, although the university’s financial aid is trying to offset increasing costs.

“Most of the schools like (MSU) were not able to make up the difference (from funding cuts) with their own funds,” Meyers said. “If state funding was higher, it would help the overall picture for us.”

With this in mind, unless the economy improves and the state is able to increase appropriations for public schools including MSU, it is very possible that tuition continues to increase in coming years, and MSU’s value in rankings, such as the one provided by Kiplinger, might drop.

MSU ranks among top 10 universities for international student enrollment

For the 2011-12 academic year, MSU ranked among the top 10 U.S. universities for international student enrollment in the Institute of International Education’s annual Open Doors Report, released Nov. 12.

MSU ranked ninth out of the top 25 institutions housing international students, with about 6,200 students enrolled for 2011-12, according to the report.

MSU ranked between the University of Michigan at No. 8 and Ohio State University at No. 10.

MSU also ranked ninth for the 2010-11 academic year, and had more than 5,700 international students enrolled, according to a past State News article.

According to MSU’s 2012 enrollment report, 9 percent of the entering undergraduates this fall were international students.

The report ranked the University of Southern California’s foreign enrollment No. 1 for the 11th year straight, according to an article in Los Angeles Times.

In total, the report found about a 6 percent increase in the number of international students in U.S. higher education institutions, with record-breaking number of about 764,500 foreign students enrolled for the 2011-12 school year, according to a press release from the Institute of International Education.

Secchia Center in Grand Rapids wins construction award

MSU received another acknowledgement when the Secchia Center in Grand Rapids won a Downtown Award for New Construction at the Grand Rapids Downtown Alliance’s meeting on Nov. 15.

The Secchia Center, which is the MSU College of Human Medicine’s headquarters, was opened in 2010 and cost $90 million.

Last year, the center also was awarded a gold certification by the U.S. Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Envrionmental Design program.

In a previous State News article, the Secchia Center was said to increase the College of Human Medicine’s enrollment to about 800 students by 2014 — nearly double of the school’s enrollment at that time. The center also helps the expand the research portfolio of the college.

This year, the MSU Board of Trustees authorized a $12 million purchase of the old Grand Rapids Press headquarters only blocks away from the Secchia Center.

Although the specific use of the location hasn’t been decided, Trustee Melanie Foster said the purchase has value as MSU looks to expand in the medical industry.