M O N D A Y OCTOBER 25, 2004
THE BROWN DAILY HERALD Volume CXXXIX, No. 95
An independent newspaper serving the Brown community since 1891
www.browndailyherald.com
Library workers reach tentative contract agreement
Simmons fields parents’ questions in Sunday session
BY SARA PERKINS
BY AIDAN LEVY
Aborting a planned Parents Weekend rally, negotiators for the union representing 90 library workers announced Friday afternoon that they had reached a tentative five-year contract agreement with the University. United Service and Allied Workers of Rhode Island representative Karen McAninch left the Rockefeller Library negotiations just prior to signing the agreement to announce the terms of the proposed contract, which will face a “pretty pro-forma” authorization vote of the union members, probably on today, before it is officially signed. The contract will include a 2.25 percent wage increase this year, changes in health insurance copayments in 2007 — the last year of the contract — and an agreement by the University to leave the library hours as they are now and give six months’ warning before reopening contract negotiations on the subject. Vice President for Administration Walter Hunter praised the tentative agreement in an e-mail to the Herald Sunday. “This new collective bargaining agreement permits the leadership of the library to make the informed decisions necessary to ensure that our libraries remain a vital scholarly resource, and outlines a package of wages, benefits and working conditions that is fair to the union members and the rest of the University community,” he wrote. The library workers’ last contract expired in September 2002; it was extended into early 2003, but since then, library workers have worked without a contract. In two years of negotiations, the union and the University have been unable to reach agreement, primarily due to disagreements about the University’s proposed reorganization of the libraries, under which individual workers would each be responsible for a variety of tasks — including shelving, cataloguing and desk staffing. Workers have contended that the reorganization would force them to do more work without a corresponding pay increase and would take away the stability of their schedules. Librarians and student workers do not belong to the union and are not involved in the contract. The union and the Student Labor Alliance had planned a Friday afternoon rally on the Main Green, including a display of about 1,000 student-signed cards expressing support for the library workers, during a Parents Weekend coffee. “If the administration won’t listen to students, they’ll listen to parents,” said TePing Chen ’07. The rally was not part of a threat to strike, said Chris Hu ’06, but an attempt to “get negotiations moving again.” “We would hope that parents would ask questions of President (Ruth) Simmons, asking why this has gone on so long,” said Debra Nelson-Danielson, a senior library reference specialist and an alternate negotiator who stayed with the
In her annual Sunday morning Parents Weekend session, President Ruth Simmons discussed ongoing developments in the Plan for Academic Enrichment and answered questions on topics including financial aid, the engineering program and the accessibility of the campus to students with disabilities. Simmons addressed a packed crowd of parents, students and faculty members in a tent set up on the Main Green Sunday at 11 a.m. During the question-and-answer session, Simmons first addressed a question about accessibility on and around campus. Many of Brown’s older buildings are not equipped to accommodate students with disabilities. “This is expensive and hard to do, but we aim to bring all buildings into compliance,” Simmons said. “With newer buildings it’s much easier.” Richard Spies, executive vice president for planning, said the University
see LIBRARY, page 4
Nick Neely / Herald
Calling himself a “failure,” Dustin Hoffman P’07 spoke Saturday evening to a capacity Parents Weekend crowd at the Pizzitola Sports Center.
Hoffman P’07 tells actors to expect — and embrace — failure BY MELANIE WOLFGANG
Two-time Academy Award winner and seven-time nominee Dustin Hoffman P’07 confessed to a packed audience Saturday night that he was “a failure.” “A Conversation with Dustin Hoffman,” sponsored by the Creative Arts Council and set in the Pizzitola Sports Center, began with the actor’s insistence that he was “not a lecturer.” He defined a lecturer as a teacher, someone who knows. “I never did and still don’t know,” he said. The event was moderated by Michael Ovitz P’05, co-founder of the Creative Artists Agency. Hoffman, who did not graduate from college, said he took an acting class during his brief time at a community college after a friend informed him, “Nobody flunks acting. It’s like gym.” So began a lifetime of on-screen and onstage achievements. And for all his talk of failure, Hoffman appeared, at 67 years old, a man rich with experience. The self-proclaimed “authentic ignoramus” began the evening with a quote from poet e.e. cummings and ended it, in tears, with a quote on art appreciation from Rainer Maria Rilke. His conversation was layered with words of advice for aspiring actors, entertaining Hollywood anecdotes — like the time he fooled fellow actor Jon Voight while dressed like a woman for his role in “Tootsie” — and commentary on everything from the presidential election to the notion of original sin. Hoffman, who grew up in Los Angeles before moving to New York to pursue acting, said in response to a question from the audience that if he weren’t an actor he would probably be a director. One of his first on-stage appearances was in a Gertrude Stein play at Sarah Lawrence College. A student from the audience asked
Hoffman how he, in his early twenties, could hope to perform with all the knowledge and experience of his elders. Hoffman, in response, pointed to Marlon Brando’s acclaimed performance, at only 29 years old, in “On the Waterfront.” A lot happens in your twenties, he said, referring to the Friday night keynote lecture by Chris Matthews P’05. “I always tell my kids it’s the question-mark decade.” He also recommended turning to the “big guys and the big gals” of literature, which is how he “got a taste of what (he) was really going to feel emotionally” when he was older.” His talk was filled with other words of wisdom for up-and-coming artists. Hoffman, a father of six, said he shapes his on-screen characters by considering first what they are not. “I think in acting, like in life, you keep chipping away at what you don’t like,” he said. His experience dressing as a woman in “Tootsie” taught him much about the female experience. Noting that he was able to pick out his own breast size for the part, he said, “You want to feel in-scale. You want to feel attractive. You want to feel sexy. You do. Believe me.” He then related a particularly moving experience he had on the set of “Tootsie” when, in costume as a woman, he was approached by a group of men. After looking Hoffman up and down, the men summarily “erased” him, turning their attention to younger and more attractive women. Hoffman said the shock of the experience sent him crying to his wife, to whom he confessed that he’d done that to women before. “I was brought up that way. I had to have trophy girls,” he said. He also pointed to the wide criticism of President George W. Bush, who he said was “not dumb” but was also “not intellectual” or introspective. “We are a flawed species,”
Med school advisor to retire after first semester, says he is considering consulting campus news, page 3
Brown rips students off with undergrad teaching assistants, writes Benjamin Bright-Fishbein ’07 column, page 7
he said. He was quick to add, however, that he was a Kerry supporter. In an interview with The Herald before the event, Hoffman said he found he had much in common with politicians. “They wear the same kind of makeup I do when I’m working. They have the same costume designers fitting them for colors. They have better writers than I do.” “And what’s marvelous is that the politicians act like they own (writers’ lines) – like an actor is supposed to,” he said. He found it interesting that politicians could use their political status to, in a sense, become entertainers. “We know the actor’s the actor,” he said. “The actor is out there telling you, ‘I’m lying. I’m not really this character.’” In contrast, the politician “is one of the great liars,” Hoffman said — but also therefore one of the great actors. “The bottom line for a politician is to be elected and then re-elected,” Hoffman said, referring to an idea put forward by political theorist Noam Chomsky. The desire to be re-elected, he said, causes politicians’ frequent hedging. “It’s by nature, I think, disingenuous,” he said. “More and more in my lifetime.” Moving to something a little less serious, Hoffman told The Herald that “God has already shifted his affection” from the Yankees to the Red Sox. “We’ll see if he puts on a Red Sox jersey or not,” he added. Kristen Greider ’08 said she thought Hoffman “was very truthful” and she appreciated his use of “raw imagery.” She referred to his use of the image of an umbilical cord when speaking about the difficulty of divorce in response to a question about “Kramer vs. Kramer.” Recalling how his own experience with divorce informed the devel-
see HOFFMAN, page 5
W E AT H E R F O R E C A S T
I N S I D E M O N D AY, O C T O B E R 2 5 , 2 0 0 4 Chris Matthews P’05 tells parents that their children should enjoy their twenties — he did campus news, page 3
see SIMMONS, page 4
M. soccer beats Cornell University 2-0 in Homecoming game after making first goal late in first half sports, page 8
Football earns Homecoming victory over Cornell with assistance of Anthony Vita ’07 sports, page 8
MONDAY
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TUESDAY
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