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WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 16, 2013
At 75 years, it’s not this UA club’s first rodeo
VOLUME 107 • ISSUE 37
STRIKE A BALANCE
NEWS - 6
ARIZONA 4-H CELEBRATES 100 YEARS
BY GABRIELLE FERNETY
The Daily Wildcat For Ben Saylor, an animal sciences junior, Rodeo Club is more than just a hobby. Rodeo is where it all began, and the UA club has the duty of reminding the community about its roots, Saylor, the club’s president, said. “I don’t want people to forget where we came from,” Saylor said. “I just feel like rodeo stems from the cattle industry and agriculture. I feel like I’m a part of something greater.” The idea of tradition is huge in the club, as the UA has the oldest intercollegiate rodeo club in the country, Saylor added. The club is celebrating its 75th year, honoring an enduring tradition of the Southwestern U.S. “It’s like a pastime,” Saylor said. “We started as a nation of agriculture and cattle.” Saylor said he believes the community should care about the country’s history, and he tries to make that a goal of the club. “The purpose of the club is to preserve Western heritage on the college campus,” Saylor said. “I think the biggest thing is word of mouth — talking to people about it is acknowledging the past.” Saylor added that he wants to make rodeo more prevalent on the college campus. “On the entertainment venue, rodeo is still huge, and it’s still just as
RODEO, 6
SPORTS - 8
DO THE WILDCATS EVEN LIFT?
ARTS & LIFE - 3
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SEE WHO’S HIDING ON CONGRESS’ THIRD FLOOR
ALEX MCINTYRE, a journalism sophomore, balances on a tight rope across from the UA Mall on Oct. 15. The members of UA Slackers, a group that practices slacklining, say they try to train almost every day.
K-12 students test the water with Project WET
OPINIONS
Adjuncts exploited in higher ed
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A UA program is teaching K-12 students in the region about the benefits of water conservation. Arizona Project WET educates students, as well as their parents and teachers, about ways be more water efficient through its School Water Audit Program. With offices in Pima, Pinal and Maricopa counties, Arizona Project WET operates a similar program with Phoenix schools called the Water Investigations Program, which is funded by the Nature Conservancy. Like the WIP, the School Water Audit Program is intended to educate the public about Arizona water issues and ways to conserve. Based out of Tucson, SWAP will use volunteer UA students to conduct a water audit, an interactive presentation, at Canyon Del Oro High School later this month. “We’re trying to get students to connect with where the water that comes out of their faucet comes from,” said Kerry Schwartz, director of Arizona Project WET, a component of UA’s Water Resources Research Center. With a curriculum that spans the course of one school year, the WIP is intended to extend students’ knowledge about water conservation through water audits as well as with field trips in which pupils put their watersaving skills to the test. This type of practical education is becoming increasingly favored by teachers, Schwartz said. “The idea is not to do those things separately, but to do them together around a real-world, relevant issue,” Schwartz said. “That is what’s going to stimulate students to think creatively and critically.” The programs begin by educating the teachers participating in the project on the unique water issues facing Arizona and the Southwest as a whole. The teachers then “take that information to their classes,” said Tara Oakes, community coordinator for the WIP.
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PHOTO COURTESY OF ARIZONA PROJECT WET
STUDENTS AT PARK Meadows Elementary measure the water collected in a test during a school water audit.
“It really is a ripple effect,” Oakes said. “If we can plant those ideas now with students that water is a limited resource that needs to be protected, then we can start making positive changes for the future.” To supplement the information the teachers provide to their students, Oakes gives presentations to teach students about topics like groundwater systems and waterefficient technology. “I always phrase it to the students as, ‘We’re doing an experiment at their school,’” Oakes said. During the water audit, the students examine water faucets in their school to determine their rates of flow. They then remove the aerator, the attachment at
the end of the faucet that houses a mesh screen, and replace it with a water-efficient one. The students then measure the new flow rate and compare it to the first measurement, Oakes said. “When you change that, it uses less water,” she said. ”Then we can calculate — just by changing that one little … piece of equipment, which costs a couple bucks — how much water you can actually save during a year.” Oakes said the replacement aerators frequently save schools hundreds of dollars in water costs. The culminating event of the WIP is a spring field trip in which students get to turn theory into practice.
WET, 6
he dirty little secret is that higher education is staffed with an insufficiently resourced, egregiously exploited, contingent ‘new faculty majority,’” writes Gary Rhoades, the director of the UA Center for the Study of Higher Education, in an op-ed piece for CNN. 49.3 percent of faculty work part-time and another 19 percent are full-time nontenuretrack, according to the op-ed. The vast majority of part-time adjunct professors receive a flat fee for every course they teach, get no benefits and have little to no job security. The tenuousness of an adjunct’s position, many of whom work on a semester-to-semester basis, leaves instructors wondering if they will still have a job in a few months. A current UA adjunct instructor who wished to remain anonymous described the process of waiting to find out if he would be employed next year — he said he didn’t even know if he would have a job in fall until early July, and even then the information he received was far from complete. “I had no idea how many sections I was getting,” he said. “I didn’t know what my contract looked like.” Only after a great deal of pestering did he learn that he was guaranteed at least two sections, or $8,000 a semester, with no benefits. “That’s not very much to live on,” he said. All part-time adjuncts must go through this waiting game and reapply for their jobs every year, the op-ed says. The exploitation of adjuncts
ADJUNCTS, 4
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QUOTE TO NOTE
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Started from the bottom now I’m here.”
SPORTS — 8