University of Tampa President Ronald Vaughn was selected as the 2008 Business Executive of the Year, and UT was selected 2008 Business of the Year in the education category, by the Tampa Bay Business Journal at an awards ceremony on Dec. 4.
Vaughn was one of seven finalists, and UT was chosen as one of two finalists. The winners were screened and selected by an independent panel of judges from Tampa Bay’s business community.
Vaughn, who has been president of UT since 1995, has overseen a period of unprecedented growth and stability at the University. UT has seen record enrollment in the past decade, and educates approximately 5,800 graduate and undergraduate students at its downtown Tampa campus. Last year students, faculty and staff provided more than 80,000 hours of community service to local organizations, and UT’s annual economic impact is approximately $500 million. UT has seen more than $210 million in new construction since 1997.
A recent article in the Tampa Bay Business Journal states that UT, under Vaughn’s leadership, has taken a more comprehensive approach to the education and development of its students than other universities. This philosophy has led to new programs focusing on the development of leadership skills, life skills and spirituality.
The article also states that with many families feeling the sting of the financial crisis, UT has ramped up efforts to make financial aid available to students.
Most recently, Vaughn received the 2007 H.L. Culbreath Profile in Leadership Award from Leadership Tampa Alumni and last year was named Tampa Bay CEO of the Year for community action.
Harold Pinter, a Nobel laureate and one of Britain’s most celebrated playwrights, died in London Wednesday after a long battle with cancer.
The University of Tampa’s Frank Gillen, a Dana professor of English and founding editor of the Pinter Review, is among the people who nominated Pinter and said after the 2005 win, “It’s a very happy day. I feel like my faith and the University’s faith in Pinter have been acknowledged.”
Gillen, who met with Pinter often and corresponded with the playwright for many years, had been invited by the Swedish Academy three years before to write a nomination, his second for Pinter.
The first, written in 1997, said the playwright “is concerned with the transformation of the human spirit” and “has stood against the misuse of authority and called attention to social and political injustice.”
Since 1987, the U.T. Press has published the Pinter Review, an acclaimed semi-annual academic journal devoted to Pinter.
“Even in the dark days when there wasn’t much interest in his work, we published faithfully, and the University supported us. I’ll always be very grateful for that. There is no other university in the world that publishes a journal devoted specifically to the works of Harold Pinter.”
One issue published Pinter’s first full draft of “The Homecoming” with handwritten revisions and an essay on its significance. The Pinter Review editor and the UT Press also sponsored the Pinter Review Prize for Drama.
“Harold Pinter is generally seen as the foremost representative of British drama in the second half of the 20th century,” the Academy said in the 2005 announcement. “That he occupies a position as a modern classic is illustrated by his name entering the language as an adjective used to describe a particular atmosphere and environment in drama: ‘Pinteresque.’”
Czech playwright and former president Vaclav Havel described Pinter’s award as “absolutely deserved.”
“You don’t really know how happy I am,” Havel wrote in a congratulatory telegram to his friend Pinter.
Pinter’s plays are stark and spare explorations of the human condition, and his finest work captures what critics have described as the poetry of everyday language. Early in his career, he perfected a style of pregnant pauses, a style that would be widely imitated and quickly came to be known as “Pinteresque.”
His best-known works are “The Caretaker” (1960), “The Homecoming” (1965) and “The Birthday Party (1960)–dark dramas in which the real action seems to be lurking in some subconscious space beneath the surface of the dialogue.
In addition to his 29 plays, Pinter also took turns as an actor, director and screenwriter. He wrote the screenplay for “The French Lieutenant’s Woman” and for one of his own plays, “Betrayal.” Both were nominated for Oscars.
Harold Pinter in "Krapp's Last Tape"
The academy also praised Pinter’s continuing analysis of “threat and injustice” and his work, since 1973, “as a fighter for human rights,” taking “stands seen as controversial.” In his later years, he became known for his political activism and for his often strident criticism of the U.S. government.
In 2005, after being treated for the throat cancer that eventually killed him, Pinter told friends that he had written his last play and would devote his energies to poetry and political activism.
It was later that year that he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. He was too ill to travel to Stockholm to accept the prize but he used the occasion to film a scathing attack on U.S. foreign policy.
“The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them,” said the frail playwright who delivered his lecture while seated in a wheelchair with a blanket over his knees.
He castigated the U.S. for supporting “every right-wing military dictatorship in the world after the Second World War” and ridiculed Americans for their “self-love.”
“Listen to all American presidents on television say the words ‘the American people,’ as in the sentence, ‘I say to the American people it is time to pray and to defend the rights of the American people and I ask the American people to trust their president in the action he is about to take on behalf of the American people.’
“It’s a scintillating stratagem. Language is actually employed to keep thought at bay. The words ‘the American people’ provide a truly voluptuous cushion of reassurance. You don’t need to think. Just lie back on the cushion,” he said.
Pinter delivered his indictment in a raspy voice, full of dramatic pauses and bitter irony. Michael Billington, theater critic for the Guardian newspaper and Pinter’s biographer, wrote that the Nobel lecture could have been staged by Samuel Beckett. Certainly, it was Pinteresque.
Born Oct. 10, 1930, in London’s East End, Harold Pinter was the son of Jewish immigrants who ran a dressmaker’s shop. When World War II broke out, he and other children from that heavily bombed district of London were separated from their parents and evacuated to the countryside, an experience that would traumatize the boy and color his writing as an adult.
After returning to London and discovering a talent for acting, he was accepted into the prestigious Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts. But he dropped out after two years and then risked a jail sentence when he refused military service. He was fined instead.
Pinter’s first full-length play, “The Birthday Party” is widely admired today but was a flop when it was first produced in London’s West End, closing after only a week.
His second play, “The Caretaker,” secured his reputation as a serious artist. The play is a spare psychological drama in which two brothers, Mick and Ashton, invite a manipulative stranger into their household and soon find themselves in a delusional struggle for power and space. The play regarded by many as Pinter’s masterpiece is “The Homecoming.” It tells the story of Teddy, a professor at an American college, who returns with his wife to the London home of his unhappy working-class family. In this work, Pinter perfected the style of pregnant pauses that eventually became synonymous with his name.
Also characteristic of his work are the stark settings–typically a bare room, a seedy boarding house or forlorn bed-sit. Pinter used bleak physical spaces to draw out the bleak interiors of his characters.
As a playwright, Pinter was at the height of his powers and his fame in the 1960s and early ’70s. He continued to write though the next two decades, turning out a dozen plays between 1980 and 2000, but none that achieved the stature or success of his earlier works.
In his later years, his plays took on a more political aspect. “Mountain Language” (1988) deals with the oppression of the Kurds by the Turkish government, while “One for the Road” (1984) tells the story of Nicolas, a self-proclaimed civilized man who earns his living as a torturer for an unnamed government. In a 2001 production of the play in London, Pinter played the role of Nicolas to huge acclaim.
“As an artist, Pinter has an alarming range,” wrote follow playwright David Hare. “He can play great, big major chords made up only of anger, indignation and contempt. But at the other end of the instrument, he can also unbalance you by reaching humor, grace and intense personal warmth.”
Pinter became an active campaigner for human rights in the early 1970s and rarely missed an opportunity to denounce the dishonesty and hypocrisy of political leaders. Americans were his favorite target.
Addressing a peace rally in London’s Hyde Park on the eve of the Iraq war, Pinter denounced the Bush administration as a “monster out of control.”
“The country is run by a bunch of criminal lunatics, with [Prime Minister Tony] Blair as their hired Christian thug. The planned attack on Iraq is an act of premeditated mass murder,” he said.
A few months later, during a poetry reading at the National Theater, Pinter said: “The U.S. is really beyond reason now. It is beyond our imagining to know what they are going to do next and what they are prepared to do. There is only one comparison: Nazi Germany.”
Pinter’s animus toward the U.S. predates the Bush administration. He was an outspoken critic of former President Ronald Reagan’s foreign policy and once in 1985, while traveling with American playwright Arthur Miller, he was thrown out of a U.S. Embassy function for denouncing the Turkish government’s flagrant human-rights violations.
Despite his criticism of the British government–he once refused a knighthood–Pinter has expressed a passion for England, its countryside and especially for cricket, which he described as “the greatest thing that God ever created on Earth–certainly greater than sex, although sex isn’t too bad either.”
Pinter married Fraser, a biographer, in 1980. His first marriage to actress Vivien Merchant collapsed in a highly publicized scandal in 1977 after he began an affair with Fraser. Pinter and Merchant had a son, Daniel. Merchant died in 1982.
“It was a privilege to live with him for over 33 years. He will never be forgotten,” Fraser said.
Story from Tom Hundley(MCT) with information from the UT and Tampa Press Web sites.
As temperatures drop and holiday decorations go up, another winter trend is sweeping college newspapers: the debate over season’s greetings dubbed the “War on Christmas.” While some writers lament the role political correctness plays in transforming traditional holiday salutations, others assert the war is a contrived controversy rooted in erroneous religious strong-arming.
Christmas attacked by the minority
Christmas heaved to accommodate beliefs of minority Source | The Battalion
I understand that not everyone celebrates Christmas. But a majority of our country does. Minorities should have every right to celebrate in their own way, right alongside the majority. But the second a minority’s personal disagreement is given the power to completely erase the importance of a majority’s, we reach the highest level of injustice and discrimination possible. Read more.
Political correctness hampers season’s spirit
‘Happy holidays’ has no relevance to this season Source | The Battalion
No matter how many times I say “Merry Christmas” to the cashiers at national chain stores and anyone who will listen, they still insist on saying “Happy Holidays” back. Once upon a time, this vexed me. I thought people were attacking Christmas. I got over it when I realized corporate managers were just trying to appeal to more potential customers in an effort to make more money. That’s as American as apple pie. But wait. Is that OK? No, getting richer has nothing to do with this season. So what relevance does “happy holidays’” have to this season? Read more.
Political correctness withers holiday spirit for employees Source | The Oracle
First, schools began discouraging teachers from saying “Merry Christmas,” “Happy Hannukah,” “Happy Kwanzaa” and the like, in favor of wishing students a vague — and arguably less offensive — “Happy holidays.” Then, some stopped putting up pictures of Santa or reindeer in favor of generic images of snowmen and snowflakes to celebrate the season instead of singling out a specific holiday. In the interest of making all students feel accepted in their classrooms, these moves made sense. However, the quest for holiday-season political correctness has been taken to an unhealthy extreme. Read more.
Political correctness ruins holiday season Source | The Maine Campus
As we move closer to finals week and colder weather, we are also getting closer to the Christmas season. That’s right, I said Christmas, not the “holiday” season. I’m tired of this walking on eggshells and skating on thin ice in the politically correct society that we live in. Americans are so afraid to say anything offensive that we constantly censor and edit ourselves to the point where we are not allowed to mention Christmas or anything related to that because — heaven forbid — someone might be offended. Read more
Holiday well wishes should be taken as acts of kindness Source | Iowa State Daily
The “holiday season” only exists because of Christmas, yet you can’t mention Christmas in public. It is why we go on winter break, put up a holiday tree and shop in the holiday section at Wal-Mart. But for some strange reason, it has even become unacceptable to tell someone to have a Merry Christmas because they might be offended if they’re not a Christian. That’s right. Some people are offended if you wish them a nice day, if that day happens to be a religious holiday. Has political correctness really seeped so far into American culture that you even have to be careful when telling someone to have a good day? Read more.
‘War on Christmas’ an imagined conflict
‘War on Christmas’ drivel smacks of xenophobia Source | Rocky Mountain Collegian
Continuing America’s proud tradition of misplaced outrage, the War on Christmas is entering yet another year of heated non-troversy. With the Catholic League and the American Family Association threatening another round of boycotts against another set of retail giants, one can’t help but admire these righteous crusaders for sending the Christian persecution complex spiraling into heretofore unimagined levels of absurdity. For it takes a special kind of mind to see a plot to destroy Christianity in something as seemingly clumsy as a corporate bid for inclusivity. Read more.
‘War on Christmas’ imagined by delusional Christians Source | The Daily Athenaeum
Lay down your arms, countrymen, and abandon the war on terror, the war on drugs, the war on poverty and the war on wars: It is time to fight with each other about what to call a holiday. Those who lament the “war on Christmas” – by which they mean salespeople who say “Happy Holidays” and various other ways in which society might be taking Christ out of Christmas – are suffering from a grand delusion. Read more.
Force all heathens to celebrate Christmas Source | The Pitt News
I have recently come to realize that there is a war being waged on this holiest of holidays. Many call it the “war on Christmas.” I have a couple of names for it myself: Operation Missile Toe; The Bombing of EggNogasaki; Christmas Tree-son; Myrrhdur; Frankinsanity. It is quite clear. The only way to spread Christmas cheer is to force everyone else in the country to celebrate exactly the same way I do. Read more.
‘War on Christmas’ contradicts Christian message Source | Daily Nebraskan
The celebration of Christmas as defined by Christianity subverts the methodology used by so many Christian talking heads as they wage their war for the right to say “Merry Christmas.” As if God cares what linguistic symbols we link together to express excitement for the Advent season. Unlike so many other religious icons and divine beings worshipped the world over, the Christian God identifies with the lowly and oppressed. But the blustery Bill O’Reilly and his culture warriors would have us think that the Christian faith is about power from above, power from a position of superiority.
Amanda Emery, a junior at the University of Michigan-Flint, was born and raised in a General Motors family.
Her parents both logged more than 30 years on the job for the automotive giant — her mother, Cathy, as a skilled welder in a Flint truck plant and her father, Gary, as a company electrician and supervisor.
Her uncle worked on the assembly line in a GM plant in Flint, and a cousin works on the assembly line at the same Flint factory.
Now retired from GM, Emery’s parents live off their company retirement packages, which include thousands of dollars in monthly income and health insurance for them and their children, among other benefits.
“Basically, you’re talking about people that are assured that they’re getting their retirement money,” she said. “They’ve worked for it for 30 years; they’re thinking their money is safe.”
But with GM burning through its cash reserves and teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, the Emery family is facing the possibility that GM veterans Cathy and Gary could soon lose most of their income.
That would leave 29-year-old Amanda, a journalism and photography double major at the University of Michigan, with the responsibility of helping support her family, assisting her mother to make payments for not only her own house but Amanda’s grandfather’s home in Kentucky and providing some form of health care for Amanda’s aging parents. Her father would be able to pick up work somewhere, but her mother would not.
“Somebody would have to pick up the slack, and I’d have to figure something out,” she said. “I would have to drop down from [studying] full-time to part-time because I’d have to work more — for sure.”
With executives from the Big Three automakers rebuffed in their attempt to obtain critical rescue loans from the federal government, the crisis engulfing the American auto industry has deepened, and its effects can be felt throughout Michigan as more plants shut down and workers lose their jobs.
But hardly mentioned so far has been the impact on students. For them, the future looks increasingly uncertain with parents subject to layoffs, tuition assistance and scholarship programs getting cut and an already weakened workforce set to lose even more jobs should the auto industry falter even more.
More than a half-dozen students whose parents work for one of the Big Three said they feared for their parents’ jobs as automakers continue to trim jobs to stay afloat.
For Dmitry Vodopyanov, 21, a senior at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, each week means another chance his father, a Chrysler engineer, could lose his job without any warning.
And what makes the situation even more uncertain, Vodopyanov added, is that his father relies almost entirely on the media to hear of the latest updates on Chrysler’s future.
“He’s always worried about it,” Vodopyanov said. “And if he’s stressed, then I’m stressed.”
Looking to cut costs, the Big Three have thrown numerous company benefits on the chopping block this year. Among them are tuition assistance programs, which provide employees with money for continuing education classes and degrees.
At the end of October, Chrysler suspended its Tuition Assistance Program for active and laid-off unionized employees. General Motors announced around the same time that it was cancelling a similar program for salaried workers as of Jan. 1. And in June, Ford Motor Company announced that it was suspending its own tuition assistance program for salaried workers.
Each of the Big Three has also said it will suspended dependent scholarship programs, in which dependents of employees received scholarships to help pay tuition costs.
Jerry Glasco, the director of financial service and budget at UM-Flint, said just over 200 students at the university currently use GM scholarships to pay tuition and fees costs.
But with the GM suspending the program at the first of the year, Glasco said those students who rely on the scholarships to cover most, if not all, of their college expenses, could have trouble staying in school because they can’t pay their tuition.
“If that program goes away it’s certainly more difficult for those students to pursue their degrees.”
And for students finishing up their degrees and aiming for a career in auto industry, they must contend with a drastically reduced workforce that could suffer further losses should any or all of the Big Three file for bankruptcy.
According to a recent report from the Center for Automotive Research in Ann Arbor, Mich., nearly three million auto industry-related jobs could be lost in a single year if the Big Three companies stopped all operations.
Jake Obradovich, 21, a senior at Kettering University in Flint, a science and technology school where students alternate between taking classes and working full-time jobs related to their degree, said that about a year ago, he was still considering the Big Three companies when he thinking about finding a job after graduation.
“Obviously, with the way things have gone in the past six to eight months, my desire to get a job with one of the Big Three has now really decreased,” he said.
Ultimately, it’s the day-to-day uncertainty, the mounting stress, that seems to weigh most on students — and especially those like Amanda Emery, who come from families with lifelong connections to the American auto industry.
Her cousin recently purchased a house, Emery said. But now, with the threat that he could lose his job for good, Emery said she’s concerned for him having to make payments on the new house.
“It hits me directly with, you know, my mom and my dad and my family,” she said. “I worry about the future. But even then, it’s still, ‘What am I going to change?’”
By Student Press Law Center, Special to The Minaret
New education privacy regulations slipping into effect at the eleventh hour of the Bush administration will make it much more difficult for journalists and parents to investigate the performance of schools and colleges, according to the Student Press Law Center, the nation’s leading authority on the legal rights of student journalists.
The U.S. Department of Education has just enacted significant changes to the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), also known as the Buckley Amendment, a 1974 statute intended to penalize schools that fail to adopt and enforce policies to safeguard the confidentiality of student education records. The changes are set to take effect January 8, 12 days before the end of the Bush administration.
The new rules would greatly expand the definition of what qualifies as a confidential “education record” to include even records with all names, Social Security numbers and other individually identifying information blacked out (”redacted”). This change will frustrate the ability of parents and journalists to use state open-records laws to obtain basic statistical information about school safety, discipline, academic performance and other essential matters, said attorney Frank D. LoMonte, executive director of the Student Press Law Center.
“By its own admission, the DOE made no attempt to strike a balance between legitimate privacy interests and the public’s right to hold schools accountable. The DOE simply said that accountability doesn’t matter and that its only concern is secrecy,” LoMonte said. “DOE’s interpretation flies in the face of every court ruling to interpret FERPA, and it goes well beyond what Congress intended in enacting the law.”
The Student Press Law Center (SPLC) is a Washington, D.C.-area nonprofit whose mission is to advocate for free-press rights for high school and college journalists nationwide. The Center provides legal information and referral assistance at no charge to students and the educators who work with them.
Historically, schools and colleges have been instructed under FERPA to redact the names, Social Security numbers and other identifying information from student records before releasing them in compliance with an open-records request. But under the new DOE rule, schools and colleges are directed to withhold documents even if all identifying information is removed, if the school believes that the requester knows, or can figure out, the students to whom a document pertains.
As an example of how it intends the rule to work, the DOE stated that the rules will prevent a school even from confirming whether it had disciplined any student for bringing a gun onto campus, because the identity of the gun-wielding student probably would be known to people within the school.
“The public has a right to know essential safety information such as what steps administrators take when they catch a student carrying a gun into a high school. There is no legitimate ‘privacy’ interest in committing a felony on school grounds, and the Department’s insistence on protecting the ‘privacy’ of a would-be school shooter over the safety interests of the public shows just how arbitrary and irrational these rules are,” LoMonte said.
The DOE circulated a draft of its new FERPA rules on March 24. The SPLC joined other open-government advocates in urging the Department to refrain from expanding the scope of FERPA, noting that FERPA already is being widely abused to withhold non-confidential documents, including audit reports and jail logs, from public scrutiny. DOE refused to make any reforms to the draft rules, and reissued them in final form in the December 9, 2008, edition of the Federal Register.
“DOE’s rules respond to a ‘problem’ that just isn’t there. Not a single person came forward with evidence that any student’s legitimate privacy interests have ever been compromised by an open-records request for statistical information,” LoMonte said. “On the other hand, DOE is well aware that schools are routinely misapplying FERPA to deny requests for documents that cannot rationally be considered private ‘education records.’”
Just last month, the DOE itself issued a ruling that the University of Virginia had misapplied FERPA in requiring victims of sexual assaults to sign confidentiality agreements under which the victims agreed — under threat of discipline — that they could not discuss the outcome of disciplinary proceedings against their attackers with anyone, to protect the privacy of the rapists.
The SPLC and its volunteer attorneys successfully sued the Department of Education in 1991 on behalf of journalists at the University of Tennessee and Colorado State University, to overturn the DOE’s irrational interpretation that FERPA prevented colleges from releasing campus police reports to the media. In response, Congress amended FERPA to clarify that the DOE’s interpretation was wrong and that police reports are public records.
The Dec. 9 Federal Register posting is viewable at http://edocket.access.gpo.gov/2008/pdf/E8-28864.pdf.
For more information on the SPLC, go to www.splc.org.
It takes “gross” messaging to get undergraduate students to wash their hands more frequently after going to the bathroom, Denver researchers find.
In fall quarter 2007, researchers posted messages in the bathrooms of two University of Denver undergraduate residence halls. The messages said things like, “Poo on you, wash your hands” or “You just peed, wash your hands,” and contained vivid graphics and photos.
The messages resulted in increased handwashing among females by 26 percent and among males by 8 percent, according to associate professor Renée Botta.
“Fear of spreading germs or getting sick by not washing didn’t mean much to students,” says Botta, the lead author of the study and an associate professor in the Department of Mass Communications and Journalism Studies. “What got their attention was the knowledge that they might be walking around with “gross things” on their hands if they didn’t wash.”
Observations in two control dorms over the same four-week period showed handwashing decreased 2 percentage points among females and 21.5 percentage points among males.
“We tried gross messages, germ messages and you’ll-get-sick messages. And the only ones that stuck was gross,” says Assistant Director of Health Promotions Katie Dunker, one of a team of five who conducted the pilot study. “We found that the ‘gross factor’ is what works, and we were able to increase hand washing behavior by a lot.”
The findings are generating interest. Universities including UC Santa Barbara, Wyoming, Colorado State and CU–Colorado Springs want to borrow DU’s techniques in hopes of improving student handwashing behavior on their campuses.
“The relevance of the message is really, really important,” she says. “You can threaten that they’ll get the flu or promise a flu-free winter, but if they don’t really care about that, your message is going to fall flat,” Botta says.
What was clear, she adds, was that the grossness campaign brought positive results not only in the study but also in a campus emergency that broke out last April. A week before the study was to be expanded to the entire University, a Norovirus outbreak made 63 students ill over a four-day period. Handwashing was identified as an important way to prevent the disease from spreading.
The study appears in the October edition of the Journal of Communication in Healthcare.
When washing hands with soap and water:
Wet your hands with clean running water and apply soap. Use warm water if it is available.
Rub hands together to make a lather and scrub all surfaces.
Continue rubbing hands for 20 seconds. Need a timer? Imagine singing “Happy Birthday” twice through to a friend!
Rinse hands well under running water
Dry your hands using a paper towel or air dryer. If possible, use your paper towel to turn off the faucet
