WOMENS CREW TEAM ROWS FROM COAST TO COAST PAGE 8 | SPORTS
THE STUDENT NEWSPAPER FOR DRAKE UNIVERSITY SINCE 1884
THE TIMES-DELPHIC DES MOINES, IOWA | THURSDAY, NOV. 11, 2010 | VOL. 129, NO. 15 | WWW.TIMESDELPHIC.COM
First-Year Senator election deemed void Rescheduled voting continues today, winner to be announced tonight by Lauren Horsche
Staff Writer lauren.horsche@drake.edu
Students will have to wait a little bit longer to find out who their first-year senator will be. The election which was slated for this past Monday and Tuesday has been moved back a day due to a technical error in voter selection methods. With the candidates down to six, all first-year students are urged to cast their ballots again due to the technical error that allowed not only the first-year undergraduate students to vote, but also the first-year graduate students and firstyear law students to vote, too. Due to this oversight, all votes cast have been deemed void. “For the first-year election, obviously the only people allowed to vote in the election are first-year students,” said Student Body President Samantha Haas. The small error, noticed by Alex Bergman, the chair of the election commission, enabled 500 more students to vote than expected.
“It is the goal of the election commission to ensure that the election process is fair,” Bergman said. For the election to be fair, all of the ballots cast had to be voided because no one knew how many graduate students voted due to anonymity. “The only ethical thing we could do was to re-do the election,” Haas said. As soon as the mistake was noticed, Drake IT was contacted and almost as soon as it was spotted, it was fixed. “Technical failures occur, and it’s no one to blame,” Bergman said. “Drake IT has been fantastic in helping me implement these changes.” With this being the first time that a first-year senator will be elected, there had to be a selection in the system for just first-year, undergraduate students. Now that the glitch is fixed, there will be exactly 864 ballots for the first-year election. All of the first-year candidates were notified Monday night about the technical failure and were given one extra day to campaign and
get the word out to other students to vote once again. “They need to be able inform their peers of what occurred without fear of reprisal,” Bergman said. As many know, campaigning during the voting period is illegal, and is cause for immediate disqualification. So candidates were given until 11:59 p.m. last Tuesday to finish campaigning and to update any social media events about the situation. Since this has happened, procedures have already been put in place to help ensure this will not happen again through the IT office and through passing down this information to the next chairs of the election commission. An e-mail was also sent out to all of the firstyear students to let them know that they can still vote for the first-year senator position. Now though, voting will take place from Wednesday, Nov. 10 at 12:01 a.m. until Thursday, Nov. 11 at 11:59 p.m. “I would just hope that all first-year students
do go out and vote on this,” Haas said. An election results event will be held at Pomerantz Stage later tonight to see if there is either a new senator at the table, or if a runoff election will begin, and everyone is invited to attend. “Regardless of any mistakes, this is exciting,” Bergman said. “This has never occurred before.”
>>ELECTION RESULTS Voting ends tonight at 11:59 p.m. Firstyear students can vote by logging into BlueView and going to the ‘Campus Life’ tab. At midnight on Pomerantz Stage in Olmsted, the winner of the election will be announced.
Mark Rudd discusses his radical 1960s activism Students participate in IBM’s Battle of the Brains by Cambria Pardner
Staff Writer cambria.pardner@drake.edu
A crowd of over 50 people gathered in the cozy Cowles Library Reading Room on Monday night to hear activist Mark Rudd recount stories of his 1960s experiences and his reflections since then. Jumping right into the height of his experiences, Rudd began the speaking engagement by reading two passages from his book “Underground: My Life in SDS and the Weathermen.” The first passage took the audience back to April of 1968 when Rudd and his Columbia University classmates threw security protocol to the wind and smashed through campus building windows until they made their way to the university president’s office. In the book, Rudd focuses on the newness of the experience of exhibiting civil disobedience and the awe the students felt at what they did: they took over five campus buildings to protest what he refers to as Columbia University’s prowar and racist policies. The second passage Rudd read detailed a reunion and a reflection of sorts that took place on Columbia’s campus 40 years after the 1968 protests. It was during this reunion that Rudd realized how deeply segregated the university was and how much turmoil African-American students went through during their time at the institution.
by Lillian Schrock
Staff Writer lillian.schrock@drake.edu
came about after Gau drove across Iowa trying to figure out how to get medicine for his dog, Strider. The team was named as finalists in July after finishing a 67-page document for their pharmacy plan. The team then traveled to Philadelphia for
Nine computer programming questions, five hours, three students and one room: would you be scared? Twelve Drake computer science students participated in the 35th Association for Computing Machinery International Collegiate Programming Contest on Saturday, also known as the Battle of the Brains competition. Four teams, each made of three Drake students, competed without fear, only the drive to apply their knowledge and, more importantly, to have fun. The competition included tens of thousands of students from universities in approximately 90 countries on six different continents. Those who came in first in their region will participate nationally, and the top 100 teams in the world will compete in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, on Feb. 27 through Mar. 4, 2011, for the World Finals. The competition was called “the Olympics of the computer programming world” by Michael Karasick, vice president of strategy and technology at IBM Software group. Drake participated in the regional competition at Grand View University on Saturday, coming in second place against Grand View University, Graceland University and Grinnell College. They also emerged in the top 25 percentile of the region with how many questions they answered correctly. Tim Urness, assistant professor of computer science at Drake, stressed that the computer science professors at Drake did not teach to this competition; they simply wanted their students to use the knowledge they already had to do their best answering the programming questions. “Drake students do well with critical thinking and I think these students are versatile,” Urness said. “They did well applying their knowledge.” Urness believed the primary objective of the competition was to have fun and make friends through computer science–and the students did just that. Liz Olson, a computer science major, said one of her favorite parts of the contest was the camaraderie among the contestants.
SEE PHARM, PAGE 2
SEE BATTLE, PAGE 2
photo by TAD UNRUH | staff photographer
MARK RUDD spoke Monday night in the Cowles Reading Room as part of the library’s Citizens Arise! Lecture Series. Rudd was a prominent activist in the 1960s and is also a writer.
Rudd quotes one African-American alumnus in his book as saying: “The time I spent at Columbia just about destroyed me. The only thing worse was watching my wife die of breast cancer.”
Through the African-American student’s perspectives, Rudd gathered that they viewed Rudd, who characterized himself as an upper-
SEE RUDD, PAGE 2
Pharmacy team places second at national competition by Ryan Price
Staff Writer ryan.price@drake.edu
Drake University’s College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences solidified its spot as a national leader in the field of community pharmacy and entrepreneurship recently by taking second place in a National Community Pharmacists Association competition. The Good Neighbor Pharmacy National Community Pharmacists Association’s PruittSchutte Student Business Plan Competition took place Oct. 23 and required the four Drake students to present a business plan for buying a preexisting community pharmacy or developing
photo by courtesy of TORI ERXLEBEN
PHARMACY STUDENTS competed in the National Community Pharmacy Association competition.
a new one. “If I could open this pharmacy tomorrow I would,” team member Travis Gau said. “It was named after a dog of mine I had, and if I could go to work tomorrow for Striders, I would.” The hypothetical pharmacy created by the team served as a compounding pharmacy that specialized in human and animal pharmaceutical services. The idea of “Striders Pharmacy”
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NEWS
OPINIONS
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Like movies? International Film Festival tonight
Which new email system do students prefer?
Drake Theater Department presents ‘Bare’
Coach Creighton shares his feelings about the football team
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