The Rice Thresher, Vol. 97, No. 3, Ed. 1 Friday, September 4, 2009 Page: 1 of 36
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I
OP-ED P. 3
You might as well call
OMG, ru so excited abt the # ofppl who txt while driving?
Because we're not. Srsiy.
AAE • p. |2
Twitter cage match
All of the Thresher sections now have Twitter accounts. Was
this our best or worst move? Find out in our head-to-head.
SPORTS P. 16
Let the tailgates begin
Rice's football season starts today at the University of Alabama
at Birmingham. Beat dem Blazers!
the Rice
Volume XCVII, Issue No. 3
Student-Run
since 1916
Friday, September 4, 2009
Rice's shanty town: from riches to rags Levyleaves
provost post
Makeshift shelters
erected to raise
poverty awareness
BY JACLYN YOUNGBLOOD
Thresher Editorial Staff
Two dollars will not buy you a
latte from the Raymond and Susan
Brochstein Pavilion, but it will be
the per-diem budget for a group of
students next week who will mimic
poverty firsthand.
In a simulation of Third World
shanty towns, dozens of Rice stu-
dents will be encamped in make-
shift housing near Brochstein
Pavilion next week. This past sum-
mer, students from Engineers With-
out Borders and Rice MicroFinance
tackled logistics for the $2 A Day
Challenge, working with a number
of administrative organizations:
Housing and Dining, Rice Univer-
sity Police Department, Facilities
Engineering and Planning and
Vice President for Administration
Kevin Kirby.
"We've had the administration's
full support and they're really excit-
ed to see this event happen," EWB
President Samantha Teltser said.
Former RMF President Josh Ozer
said the event will serve both as a
living museum to educate people
about poverty and as a fundraiser
for the student groups involved.
The Challenge
Teaming up to host the $2 A Day
Challenge, EWB and RMF are seek-
ing to increase poverty awareness
on campus, as about two billion
people across the world live on less
than $2 per day.
Nearly 75 students will be liv-
ing in a temporary shanty town
in the Central Quad to simulate
poverty in underdeveloped coun-
tries. The students will move in
Tuesday and stay until dinner on
Friday, a total of four days and
three nights.
The shanty town will be a col-
lection of individual shanties. The
construction committee, co-chaired
by Wiess College junior Jeremy Goo-
a • *
•v. av'
V ■ ■ *
. '
COURTESY JOSH OZER
A set of model shanties allowed participants — such as Will Rice College junior Josh Ozer, Wiess College junior Jer-
emy Goodreau and Will Rice senior Samantha Teltser, above — to examine where they will be living for four days.
dreau and Brown College junior Matt
Stearns, devised the floor plans for
the shanties. Two sizes of shanty will
be built — an eight-by-eight struc-
ture, which will hold four students,
and an eight-by-ten structure, which
will hold six students.
Elena White, a Martel College
sophomore and president of Owl
MicroFinance, a subdivision of
RMF, said the shanties will be built
mainly out of two-by-fours, some
plywood, and cardboard boxes.
She said Southland Hardware and
Stahlman Lumber Company, both
Houston businesses, donated supplies.
"These plans were developed for
up to ioo participants," White said.
"The number of shanties we build
will depend on the final number of
participants we have."
The participants will eat three
meals per day in the shanty town.
Because the students will not be
eating in the serveries during the
challenge, Teltser, a Will Rice Col-
lege senior, said H&D agreed to
provide rice and beans each day.
To bolster the community feeling of
the shanty town, she said students
will take turns serving the meals
and cleaning up after each other.
O see Shanty, page 5
ESTHER problems stunt registration process
By Sabrina Toppa
For the Thresher
ESTHER may not be the self-
aware joint project of a con-
spiracy between the government
and Rice administration, but it
nevertheless came to a screech-
ing halt on the Friday of Orienta-
tion Week when the system slowed
down so much it prevented some
students from being able to register
for classes at all.
To accommodate the largest
class in Rice's history, the Office of
the Registrar designated two reg-
istration time slots based on the
last six digits of a student's Rice
ID. The first group registered at 8
a.m. and the second at 8:30 a.m.
However, both groups encoun-
tered difficulty registering when a
bottleneck in one of the system pro-
cesses caused requests to cluster
and impede the flow of oncoming
requests. For students, this mani-
fested as dropped connections and
time-out errors.
For freshmen who could log-
in on the first attempt, remaining
logged in before ESTHER timed
out proved difficult. Many re-
ported that their session prema-
turely expired, causing ESTHER to
reload the log-in page before they
completed registration.
Students such as Duncan
College freshman Rachel Green
thought it was inconvenient to have
only two staggered groups for Rice's
largest entering class.
"Maybe we should have had
more than two groups, or a server
upgrade," Green said. "Half the
freshmen class was registering at
8 a.m. and we only got 30 minutes.
I couldn't register for COMM 103,
even the 8 a.m. one, and that was
my last resort."
Many students, including Wi-
ess College freshman Celeste Riepe,
speculated that the large size of the
incoming class precipitated the sys-
tem problems.
"There were so many people that
the servers could not log in people
properly," Riepe said. "I logged in
at 8:35 a.m. like I was supposed
to, and I didn't get any classes
until 10 a.m. And that was only
when I began to enter my classes
one by one instead of all at once.
It took me more than 10 times to
log into ESTHER."
However, both the Regis-
trar and Information Technol-
ogy Administrative Systems
0 see ESTHER, page 7
BY JOCELYN WRIGHT
Thresher Editorial Staff
Without Howard Hughes Provost
Eugene Levy's influence, Rice, as both
a university and a campus, would be
noticeably different. Levy's work with
the Passport to Houston program, the
Vision for the Second Century and
the Bioscience Research Collabora-
tive has shaped Rice into the institu-
tion it is today.
As such, his announcement Tues-
day that he will be stepping down at
the end of this academic year marks
the end of a remarkable and pro-
longed career, President David Lee-
bron said.
"[Levy] is a remarkable individ-
ual of incredible depth, and he has
served the university with uncom-
mon dedication," Leebron said. "I
think we all owe him a deep debt of
appreciation."
Levy said he is stepping down
both because the timing is appropri-
ate and so that he has more time to
spend on academic pursuits.
"I'm looking forward to being able
to focus on the intellectual reasons
for which I embarked on this Ire in
the first place instead of guiltily steal-
ing minutes here and there, which
is what I've had to do in these last
years," Levy said.
Since his arrival at Rice in 2001,
Levy has been expanding the ability
of the departments and schools to
take more independent and creative
initiative, engaging the deans in
more philanthropic fundraising and
raising additional resources.
Many of the programs Levy advo-
cated became part of Leebron's Vision
for the Second Century.
"[The V2C] is David's term, but
there is nothing in there that I dis-
agree with," Levy said.
Levy, who began his career as an
assistant professor of astronomy at
the University of Arizona but was
quickly promoted to head of the de-
partment, said he has spent most of
his career balancing his executive re-
sponsibilities wifh his desire to focus
on intellectual pursuits.
"What made the balance posi-
tive for me is the ability to shape the
agendas of universities that I've been
associated with and to engender new
initiatives and programs to shape
the environments in ways that sup-
ported and nurtured education and
research," Levy said.
One of the biggest academic proj-
ects Levy helped head was the BRC,
which opened this fall. Levy, a New
York native, proposed what became
the BRC in 2001. At the time, he
said it would allow Rice to be at the
forefront of biological research, an
area in which Rice previously had
a relatively small presence as an in-
stitution. He said working with out-
standing research and educational
institutions focused on biology and
biomedical sciences would increase
Rice's impact in the field.
O see Provost, page n
Last day to add classes
If you didn't shop around for classes,
you're plumb out of luck. Today is the last
day to add a class for the fall semester. If
you want to add after this deadline, you'll
have to petition the Committee on Exami-
nations and Standing. Scary.
Keepin'you cool
On Thursday, The Rice Gallery welcomes
Wayne White's exhibit BIG LECTRIC FAN
TO KEEP ME COOL WHILE I SLEEP. The
exhibit features a 15-foot sculpture of
country legend George Jones' head. It will
run through Oct. 18.
Take a break
Get drunk Sunday night and don't worry about a
Monday morning hangover. There are no classes
on Monday because of Labor Day, a university
holiday. Sleep in, don't do any work and watch
the construction of the shanty town in the
Central Quad.
INDEX
Opinion
2
News
4
Arts & Entertainment
12
Sports
15
Calendar
23
Backpage
24
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Michel, Casey. The Rice Thresher, Vol. 97, No. 3, Ed. 1 Friday, September 4, 2009, newspaper, September 4, 2009; Houston, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth443128/m1/1/: accessed June 30, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu.; crediting Rice University Woodson Research Center.