Campus News Editor
MINNEAPOLIS, Minn. - Hunger strikers showed no signs of ending their standoff this weekend after rejecting University of Minnesota administrators' responses to protest demands in a tense meeting Friday afternoon.
Tempers flared and the meeting escalated into a shouting match as the four headband-wearing protesters expressed discontent over the administrators' responses, which would devote more resources to the Chinese program.
University President Mark Yudof and several other senior administration officials attended the meeting. The exasperated officials gasped and sighed throughout the meeting. After an hour, they declared the meeting an impasse and stormed out.
A follow-up meeting is scheduled for Friday with Associate Vice President of Minority Affairs Nancy Barcelo. Members of the Chinese program, Progressive Student Organization and several UM cultural centers are fasting to protest understaffing in the Chinese program.
The protesters demand the Chinese program be recognized as an independent, equal department and that UM advertise for a fourth tenured professor for the program.
Officials did not meet the students' demands in the meeting, which focused on the appointment of a fourth tenured professor. Issues of equal treatment and departmental independence were not discussed.
To convince the students to end the hunger strike, UM officials prepared a written response, which said the appointment of additional faculty will be considered in the future as enrollment increases to justify the investment. Protester Ben Ridgway said he was not impressed with the administrators' response. "It's not necessarily what we were asking for in the first place," he said.
Continuing its strike over the weekend, the group decided that students who were feeling dizzy or lethargic would drink juice and soup broth so they could continue to study and work.
TUCSON, Ariz. - An acquaintance of the man accused of starting a fire at a University of Arizona-area apartment complex early Wednesday said he believes his former schoolmate started the blaze, then started playing "hero" during the resulting commotion.
Media arts sophomore Anthony Ortega, who lives two doors away from the charred lobby of Sky View Apartments, said he has known arson suspect Randy Stuth, 20, since high school.
Stuth was arrested on suspicion of arson and criminal damage Wednesday in connection with the fire that sent about 200 people, most of them UA students, scrambling to look for other lodging.
John Andes, a manager at Sky View Apartments, said residents will not be able to return to their homes for several more days because the building's fire alarm system has not yet been repaired.
Ortega said Stuth visited his apartment and that of another resident minutes before he allegedly threw a burning paper airplane into the apartment building's lobby at about 1 a.m.
"I threw him out because he was drunk, and five minutes later the place is on fire," Ortega said.
Ortega said he didn't actually see Stuth launch a flaming plane into the lobby, but became suspicious after he saw Stuth panting, "hyperventilating" and bragging to firefighters that he was the first person to alert people of the blaze. "I asked if he had a cigarette, and he stopped hyperventilating and said 'Yes,'" Ortega said. "That's why I knew it was an act."
Stuth eventually told detectives at the scene that he indeed lit a paper airplane on fire and let it fly through the lobby, a police spokesman said Wednesday.
WASHINGTON - After months of deliberation over George Washington University Law School professor Elizabeth Glass Geltman's decision to use another professor's old exam as her own, the GW Law School recently chose not to renew her three-year teaching contract with the university.
Geltman was hired in 1995 as an associate professor to teach environmental law classes. Her first class, however, was a property law class with more than 100 students.
Law School professor Joshua Schwartz gave Geltman some old exams and other materials to use as library resources and teaching aides. When her students took the final exam, many recognized it as a slightly modified version of the one in the library.
The administration was notified immediately and Law School Dean Jack Friedenthal offered a written apology to the students, who were allowed to retake the exam, receive a "pass" in the class or receive a grade equal to their average in all of their first-year classes. Geltman told the faculty that her decision to use the exam was the "mistake of a young, overworked first-time teacher" and that the pressures of drafting an exam at the end of the semester became yet another "pressing responsibility."
Many law students have little sympathy for the young professor.
"Her actions showed poor judgment," said Scott Mory, GW Student Bar Association president. "If I told my professors that I didn't have time to study, they wouldn't cut me any slack."
The faculty decision to release Geltman, which took more than three hours of deliberation, did not come easily. Students who supported her drafted a letter to the Tenure and Appointments Committee praising her overall performance as an educator as well as her commitment to her students. Geltman is the author of several books and founder of the Environmental Lawyer, a law journal supported by the American Bar Association and GW Law School.
College News Roundup briefs were collected from U-Wire
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