daily herald the Brown
vol. cxxii, no. 62
INSIDE
Page 6
Dug up
friday, september 7, 2012
Alums compete at London Olympics games By Mathias Heller Senior Staff Writer
Archaeology team discovers Mayan stucco masks Page 7
Director search The Watson Institute seeks a permanent director
Pages 9, 12
Welcome Photo spread: First-years enter the Van Wickle Gates today
tomorrow
84 / 68
80 / 64
since 1891
Courtesy of david silverman
Craig Kinsley ’11 competed on the U.S. national team for javelin throwing at the London 2012 Olympic games.
Two alums competed on the world stage this summer, representing their home countries in the 2012 London Summer Olympics. Craig Kinsley ’11, a former javelin thrower and volunteer coach on the Brown men’s track and field team, and Nikola Stojic ’97, who rowed men’s crew for Bruno, represented the United States and Serbia, respectively. Stojic also competed in the past three Summer Olympic games, starting with the 2000 Sydney games and continuing through the 2004 Athens games and 2008 Beijing games. This summer in London, he competed in the men’s pair event, placing fourth in the heats before going on to place sixth in both the semifinal and final rounds of the competition. Stojic competed at a high level even as a Bear, helping Bruno secure a national championship in 1995, wrote Paul Cooke, head coach of the men’s crew team, in an email to The
Herald in June. “Nikola was an impressive oarsman and very successful during his time at Brown,” Cooke wrote. “He was very powerful and an aggressive racer.” A first-time Olympian, Kinsley entered the London games without ever having participated in an international competition, making his spot on the U.S. national team even more impressive, according to Michelle Eisenreich, director of the University’s track and field program. “It’s an amazing accomplishment just to get there,” Eisenreich said. “He really embraced the Olympic spirit while he was over there.” Kinsley failed to advance past the first round of qualifications for men’s javelin throwing, earning a ranking of 23rd out of the 44 athletes in the initial qualifying round. But he was the top finisher for the U.S. team, had the fourth best throw of his career and improved his international ranking by seven spots. / / Olympics page 2
U.’s financial future on unstable path, report finds Higgs boson By Tonya Riley Senior Staff Writer
Many elite institutions, including Brown, are on a “financially unsustainable” economic path, according to a joint report released in July from Bain & Company, a consulting firm, and Sterling Partners, a private equity firm. Their analysis found that nearly one-third of the 1,700 colleges and universities they analyzed were unsustainable, and data gathered from 2005-2010 suggests a worsening financial outlook for Brown. The University’s expense ratio — a measure of its costs to its earnings — decreased by 22 percent. Its equity ratio — a measure of its equity as a percentage of assets — decreased by seven percent. The trends in both the expense and equity ratios place the
University in the highest risk category among the colleges and universities included in the report. “The point of the report wasn’t to pick winners and losers — it was to show there is a problem,” said Tom Dretler, an executive at Sterling and co-author of the analysis, titled “The Financially Sustainable University.” He said the report aims to raise concerns about the ability of higher education institutions to meet goals of maintaining financial aid programs while adapting to new and more diverse student demographics. Dretler’s general advice to schools included initiating cuts farthest from “the academic core” and looking at administrative overhead. He said he could not recommend any specific changes for the University without reviewing relevant data.
But administrative overhead “would be remarkably hard to get rid of,” said Michael Rizzo, an assistant professor of economics at the University of Rochester who was a researcher with the Cornell Higher Education Research Institute. Financial sustainability can be an issue for most colleges during a bad economy, but highly ranked schools generally weather downturns successfully, Rizzo said. He explained that colleges don’t benefit from the “experience curve” — an ability to make a product costefficient over time as detailed in the report — because instruction is a “labor-intensive” process. It involves face-to-face interaction and cannot take advantage of technology as much as other industries, Rizzo said. Beppie Huidekoper, Brown’s ex-
ecutive vice president for finance and administration, said the information in the report is not new, adding that it raises the same questions higher education has been dealing with since the start of the economic downturn. Huidekoper said that the University has already taken steps to increase financial sustainability. Many of the changes mentioned by Huidekoper are similar to those outlined by Bain and Sterling. For example, by using cloud-based software, Huidekoper said the university spends 25 percent of what peer institutions spend on similar services. The University has not increased its administrative spending in the past 10 years, Huidekoper said. She said the University has done everything to cut costs short of jeopardizing its educa/ / Financial page 3
Exhibit sheds new light on Chinese nationalism By maddie berg Senior Staff Writer
Traditional exhibitions consist of multiple works hanging in a conventional white-walled space. But Jin Shan’s newest exhibition, “My dad is Li Gang!” — which opened Sept. 1 in the David Winton Bell Gallery — turns the gallery into what the curator, Ian Russell, called “a yellow disco party.” Every inch of the disco party — from the central sculptural piece to the specially constructed walls — seems to crawl with meaning. The gallery space itself is bathed in a yellow light, a reference to an ethnic stereotype, Russell said. The light reflects off a replica of China’s Tiangong 1 space station, representative of China’s emerging
position of power in the space race, as well as the nationalist sentiments that accompany it. This replica is covered with small mirrors, much like a disco ball, and thereby creates fractured and distorted reflections. “He is taking the space station — something that might inspire national pride — and saying, ‘This gesture of pride or ambition or of technological achievement is actually something that is rather perverse or distorts everything around it,’” explained Russell, who collaborated with Jin on the installation. The station turns and appears to be powered by a three-wheeled bicycle, a means of transport used by migrant workers in Shanghai. “The energy that is / / Disco page 3
jane hu / herald
Objects speak to Chinese oppression in Jin Shan’s Bell Gallery exhibition, which its curator Ian Russell called a “yellow disco party.”
breakthrough fueled by U. professors By Kate Nussenbaum Senior Staff Writer
In the decades leading up to the European Organization for Nuclear Research’s (CERN) July 4 announcement of the probable discovery of the Higgs boson, five Brown professors were hard at work theorizing the particle’s existence and collecting and organizing the data that made possible this leap forward in physics. The Standard Model of particle physics, which was developed in the early 1970s and has since been thoroughly tested, describes the way matter and forces interact around us. Over the past 40 years, experiments have slowly revealed the existence of key components of the theory, such as different quarks — the elementary particles that make up matter. But since it was proposed, scientists’ understanding of the Standard Model has been incomplete. For the theory to successfully describe the way the subatomic world works, another particle is needed — one that explains how elementary particles such as quarks and leptons acquire mass. That particle, the Higgs boson — commonly referred to as the “God particle” — was theorized in 1964, but until this summer, little experimental evidence supported its existence. Proposing the boson When the Higgs boson was first proposed, scientists were not searching for the origin of particle mass. Gerald Guralnik, professor of physics at Brown, / / Higgs page 4