W E D N E S D A Y OCTOBER 9, 2002
THE BROWN DAILY HERALD Volume CXXXVII, No. 88
An independent newspaper serving the Brown community since 1891
www.browndailyherald.com
Med School hospitals stand to lose $2M thanks to federal Medicare cuts BY SARA PERKINS
Kimberly Insel / Herald
Ed Goll was serving drinks Tuesday afternoon at the Graduate Center Bar, where the establishment’s non-profit charter allows it to serve most drinks at a cost much lower than the average pub.
At GCB, drinking is for a good cause BY JESSICA WEISBERG
Extensive community service responsibilities can hinder a student’s social life, but it’s possible to kill two birds with one stone with a visit to the Graduate Center Bar. Chartered in 1969 as a non-profit organization, the bar recycles monthly profits to finance maintenance of the facility and then donates all extra funds to charity. “On an exceptional month, we’ve donated as much as $5,000 to $8,000 to various causes,” said Manager Susan Yund. “At the GCB, one can drink and know your money’s not going into some greedy guy’s pocket,” said Joshua Sachar GS, a fifth year graduate student in engineering. The bar, located in the basement of the Graduate Center in a windowless bundle of rooms, is operated as a completely separate entity from the University. “Our only association is to serve the community,” Yund said. The bar has a board of directors who meet monthly to discuss membership policies and budgetary concerns. “Being on the board gives the customer input into the running of the establishment,” said Sachar, also treasurer of the board. Every year half the board’s seats are open for re-election. While members of the board are not presently frequent customers, Yund said, “most of the board members were customers at one point.” Board members are elected every April in adherence with established quotas: six graduate students, two staff members and two other members, Yund said. Exempt from tax requirements, the bar charges significantly less than a profit-oriented bar, Yund said. “Even dinky little holes charge more than we do,” Yund said. “Our draft and liquor is significantly cheaper, and our bottled beer is cheaper but not by leaps and bounds.” The price for a pint of draft beer ranges from $1.50 to $3.25. “We keep services really low,” added bartender Serena
Andrews, who works in the Dean of the Faculty’s office. Although organized and managed independently of the University, its location on Brown’s campus places certain restraints on the bar’s operations, Yund said. “They (University administrators) don’t want us to run like Wickenden Pub” she said. Instead, the bar is a private club. A yearly membership fee of $20 — not to be confused with a cover charge — entitles customers to an unlimited number of visits, during which they can invite three guests. A one-night membership fee costs $5. The yearly membership fee is included in the student activity fee of graduate students’ tuition, and the bar covers the yearly membership fee of its board members. Yund described the atmosphere as that of a “neighborhood bar.” The bar rarely hosts live music. “Usually the music is the bartender’s choice,” Sachar said, “which tends to be good.” Although established primarily for the faculty’s recreation, today the bar attracts mostly graduate students. “Second semester we begin to see more undergraduates,” Yund said. On Thursdays and Fridays after 11 p.m., the bar tends to get crowded. “The GCB is one of the strictest bars about carding in the area,” Sachar said. “People like to go there because they know they won’t be drinking with people under 21.” Such popularity allows the bar to donate its profits to different charities, which have varied over the years from AIDS research to Habitat for Humanity, Yund said. “We regularly support Fox Point East Side Little League,” she said. “We’ve sent underprivileged kids to summer camp, and we recently sponsored Hope High School students’ entrance in a playwright competition in an Edinburgh Drama Festival.” As manager, Yund selects the charities to support. “If (board members) disagree, then the choice would be carefully discussed,” he said. The Grad Center Bar is open daily and during the summer.
Brown Medical School’s eight affiliated teaching hospitals could each lose as much as $2 million annually because of federally proposed Medicare cuts, which if implemented would deprive U.S. teaching hospitals of $800 million, or 15 percent of their indirect expense funding. The cuts were supposed to take effect last week, but Congress may delay implementing them and the president will have the final say. “There was some encouraging news out of Washington,” said Brown Medical School Interim Dean Richard Besdine. “We’ll know on Monday” if President George Bush agreed to “put a stay on implementing the cuts,” he said. The Brown Medical School has agreements with eight teaching hospitals for a variety of programs. The medical school sends third- and fourth-year students to local teaching hospitals to do clinical clerkships in their intended specialties, and graduates participate in a large program of 900 residents, interns and fellows. Medicare supports residency programs through two types of funding — direct and indirect expense funding. Direct expense covers the salaries and benefits of residents and interns, around $50,000 per resident per year, Besdine said. Direct expense funding will not be cut. Indirect expense funding pays for the meat of a residency program, including the cost of employing faculty to oversee and teach the residents, classroom space, audiovisual and educational materials and especially the cost of extra medical tests that residents order, Besdine said. “Indirect expenses were calculated last back in 1983,” Besdine said. “The smarter the hospital was” in justifying expenses as part of the teaching program, “the higher the payment was.” Some hospitals are awarded as much as $200,000 per resident, he said. “These payments help hospitals operate see MEDICARE, page 4
Semester’s first ACUP meeting held behind closed doors BY EMIR SENTURK
The Advisory Committee on University Planning drastically changed the way it operates, holding its first meeting of the semester behind closed doors. Student and faculty representatives gathered Monday evening for the first in a series of weekly sessions that will no longer be open to the public as they have been in past years. The University’s new Provost and ACUP Chairperson Robert Zimmer mandated the change in the committee’s modus operandi. “The meetings need to be closed in order to lead to open conversation and decision making,” Zimmer told The Herald in September. “What we really want is to get the openness from the closing of it.” “The idea is that in order to allow for really frank and critical discussions about matters or decisions this University needs to make, it would be helpful to have the meetings closed,” said Assistant Provost Brian Casey. This change to the committee’s protocol parallels that of Princeton University’s Priorities Committee, a group charged with roughly the same budgetary planning tasks as ACUP. “PriCom” meetings, as they are known at Princeton, are not open to the public, according to the Daily Princetonian. see ACUP, page 4
I N S I D E W E D N E S D AY, O C T O B E R 9 , 2 0 0 2 New health education Web site puts sensitive health help online for students page 3
R.B. Litchfield maintains Renaissance Web site, one of many at University page 3
In first-year units, WPCs come up short on numbers but not on effectiveness page 5
TO D AY ’ S F O R E C A S T Nick Noon ’05 says affirmative action should not be labeled reverse discrimination column,page 15
Men’s tennis surges but ultimately can’t pull out the win in ECAC matches sports,page 16
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