The Jewish Student Union and Spartans for Israel will hold Israel Fest around 6 p.m. today at the rock on Farm Lane. The free event will include performances from local bands and singers, as well as a performance from Remedy, who is affiliated with the Wu-Tang Clan.
During his free time this summer, Cyrus McNeal didn't thumb through magazines. He created one geared toward MSU minorities. "I sat down and thought about the ups and downs and what it would take," McNeal said.
It is a season of change this fall for MSU faculty, which approved five new task forces that will examine such university components as the Academic Governance system, communication and evaluation of academic programs and administrators at a Faculty Council meeting Tuesday. The approval of these task forces is a step toward solving problems that some faculty members say have been bothering them for years - namely, their role in important MSU decisions. All five of the approved committees, composed of faculty, students, administrators and MSU Board of Trustees members, will now begin to look at these issues.
The Jewish Studies Program will hold a screening of the film "Walk On Water (Lalechet Al Hamayim)" at 7:15 p.m.
To prepare for last weekend's Ford Ironman Wisconsin Triathlon, MSU students Joshua McCallum and Andris Roze rode their bikes from East Lansing to Petoskey - a nearly 210-mile journey that took the pair 14-and-a-half hours to complete. It was just one component of a rigorous training schedule - twice daily, six days a week since May - to prepare for Sunday's Ironman race in Madison, Wis. In an event where 19 percent of the 2,076 competitors dropped out, both McCallum, a microbiology senior, and Roze, a finance senior, finished the event.
Bob Murphy is worried about the future of his involvement in the higher levels of the Academic Governance system. The main feature on the agenda for today's Faculty Council meeting includes discussing and voting on five different task forces, one of which could have major implications on Murphy's role in Academic Governance. The task forces are geared to improve areas highlighted in the Faculty Voice Report, a result of a committee of faculty that met last year to troubleshoot ways to give the faculty more voice in university issues. The Faculty Voice Report recommended that a task force restructure Academic Governance by creating a new executive group, called the Faculty Executive Committee. This group would be composed of only six faculty members. A committee made of solely faculty members has Murphy, chairperson of ASMSU's Academic Assembly, wondering where he gets to participate. "It completely destroys any sort of student input we have as part of (Academic) Governance," Murphy said.
Staff and students from the Chicano/Latino studies program are calling for an increase in future funding and office space, guaranteed positions for various staff members and a comprehensive plan for Chicano and Latino student admissions and retention rates. Members of the program met with Provost Kim Wilcox a second time on Monday and presented him with a list of these concerns, which also includes making the program into a department. Interdisciplinary studies in social science and community relations junior Claudia Gonzalez works in the Chicano/Latino studies office and said the office's budget projections arrived late and appeared to allocate about $77,000 less than the year before. On Friday, several members from the program attempted to speak with President Lou Anna K.
When botanical technicians Hope Rankin and Peter Murray arrive at the Beal Botanical Garden every day to work on the more than 5,000 different plants found there, their duties don't always include routine upkeep of the grounds and plants. The 5-acre garden, which is always open for public access, is occasionally the site of vandalism or theft. The garden's curator, Frank Telewski, said garden technicians have to make repairs about once a month because of vandalism. The amount of time and money it takes to repair the garden depends on what was stolen or damaged, Telewski said. "Damage to our structures is probably our biggest problem because of the amount of labor involved in taking care of it," Telewski said.
By Tara Thoel Special to The State News About 3,000 Detroit business executives were victims of identity theft in 2000, which lends evidence to a trend that many identity theft crimes happen in the office, an MSU associate professor said Saturday. Criminal justice Associate Professor Judith Collins, who also is director of the MSU Identity Theft Partnerships in Prevention, spoke at the Kellogg Center on Saturday as part of the "Saturday Seminar" lecture series.
For more than 100 years, students have been walking on top of history. Hidden just a few feet beneath the sidewalks lying east of the MSU Museum, artifacts like padlocks and keys, pieces of champagne bottles and a stove were discovered within the remains of the first MSU dormitory, Saints' Rest, by a group of students and faculty. On Friday and Saturday, the findings were shown to the public for the first time as part of the Sesquicentennial Academic Convocation weekend. This event showed some of the spots the group worked in this summer, accompanied by posters and displays of some of the discovered artifacts at the Saints' Rest excavation, which was launched in early June and recently completed. "It gives people a very good sense of the history of the institution," anthropology Professor Bill Lovis said.
A truck of pet food and supplies collected by MSU veterinary students is en route to Louisiana State University, where more than 1,000 pets of Hurricane Katrina evacuees are being housed. Veterinary technology sophomore Amy Schupska and others from the College of Veterinary Medicine put on a pet food and supply drive last weekend.
MSU has the highest on-campus parking meter rates in the Big Ten, but ASMSU hopes to change that. Student Assembly members of ASMSU, MSU's undergraduate student government, voted Thursday to advocate for lower parking meter rates on campus. It costs $1.50 per hour to park at most metered parking spaces on campus - 50 cents more than the average price at Big Ten schools, and 90 cents more than the student meter rate at the University of Iowa. "It's ridiculous that we pay more than a quarter dollar for a quarter hour," said Derek Wallbank, Communication Arts and Sciences representative for the assembly. Wallbank introduced the idea to ASMSU after he was surprised to notice meters were cheaper at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, because it's in a downtown area. Last school year at an All-University Traffic and Transportation Committee meeting, Wallbank raised the issue at but it was too late in the semester for committee members to do anything, he said. The committee, or AUTTC, is made up of students, faculty and other representatives from the university and makes recommendations to Vice President for Finance and Operations Fred Poston. There are two representatives from ASMSU on the committee, including Wallbank, who plans to work with the MSU police to come up with a proposal to give to the All-University Traffic and Transportation Committee. "ASMSU hasn't proposed much to AUTTC in the last few years, so we don't have any institutional memory of how best to do it," Wallbank said.
By Melissa Kayko Special to The State News Horses neighed sporadically and hooves clomped against the hard cement floor as Jodi Pepper gave her horse a quick pat at the MSU Pavilion for Agriculture and Livestock Education on Saturday afternoon. While closing up the pen for her horse, Camera Loves You, which already displayed a first-place ribbon won in an earlier competition, Pepper relaxed and waited for the competition to wrap up and for the results to be announced. "I put in a lot of hard work," the high school senior said, adding she took care of the horse for a year for the annual competition at MSU. After raising them for a year, teenagers from Michigan gathered to present their horses, with names such as Benns Navigator and Northern Moon, at Saturday's 4th Annual Michigan 4-H Standardbred Show and Sunday's Great Lakes 2005 Yearling Sale. Pepper was one of 12 students who competed in the Michigan 4-H Standardbred Program, which offers an opportunity for Michigan 4-H members to look inside the harness racing industry and work with Standardbred race horse breeders while they complete tasks in taking responsibility for a horse that could later be sold at the Yearling Sale. The program is organized by the Michigan Harness Horsemen's Association, the Michigan Standardbred Breeders Association and the MSU Extension.
Any questions about the safety of the restructured intersection in front of the new bronze Sparty statue on campus have officially been put to rest, civil and environmental engineering Associate Professor Tom Maleck said. "Whatever problem there was, it went away," said Maleck, who wrapped up a traffic study at the new intersection of Kalamazoo Street and Red Cedar and Chestnut roads last week. Maleck, who works with the MSU Department of Police and Public Safety on traffic issues, said he was asked to conduct the study at the new intersection by deputy police Chief Mike Rice.
As much as half of the MSU community has yet to update MSU NetID passwords, and the deadline to change them is quickly approaching, said Rich Wiggins, senior information technologist for Academic Computing & Network Services. "We're really concerned about having a large number of folks who don't know why they can't get in and overwhelming our help desk," Wiggins said. MSU upgraded its authentication system and one of the requirements is a "strong password," Wiggins said, which is one that has at least one capital letter, one lowercase letter, one numeral and is at least eight characters long.
Holmes, Williams, Morrill, Snyder, Hannah, Wharton. They aren't just names of buildings around campus - they're characters in an hour-long documentary on MSU's history scheduled to air on local Public Broadcasting Service affiliate WKAR in October. The documentary was created as part of the sesquicentennial celebration, which marks MSU's 150th anniversary.
When most people think of dodgeball, two things come to mind - an elementary school gym-class activity or a 2004 movie starring Vince Vaughn and Ben Stiller. Students who came out to watch Thursday's Extreme Dodgeball competitions at the rock on Farm Lane got something in between. The competitions, which were brought to campus by Comcast and the Game Show Network, or GSN, featured a Thursday afternoon matchup between teams from MSU and the University of Michigan. "It's the same game we played in elementary school, but with attitude," said Jerome Espy, Comcast's Michigan spokesman.
Radford Jones brought his expertise from working as a Secret Service agent to MSU and created a series of Homeland Security classes, to better equip communities in handling emergency situations and threats of disaster in today's world.
When Uruguay native Mauricio Kaufmann was trying to decide which college to attend, he had some standards for his future school. The economics junior wanted to attend college in the northern United States so he could improve his English and meet more people. After being accepted to MSU, Kaufmann discovered that receiving financial aid would not be an easy task. "As an international student, it's really hard to get financial aid," he said.
The film "Kandahar" is showing at 7 p.m. today in the North Conference Room in the Main Library, as part of the Friday Night Film Series and the One Book, One Community program. The film follows the character, Nafas (Nelofer Pazira), and her return to her homeland of Afghanistan after receiving a suicide proclamation from her troubled sister, who was left behind when the family fled the country when Nafas was a child.