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NBA all-star weekend Does anyone care anymore?
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Portland State University Portland State University Thursday, Feb. 21, 2013 | vol. 67 no. 40
Sensitive PSU eyes changes to child care on campus smoke detectors desensitize students Jaime Dunkle vanguard staff
Smoke detectors on campus are extremely sensitive, especially in the Smith Memorial Student Union building. A couple of weeks ago, a dirty smoke detector triggered the fire alarm, and everyone had to evacuate SMSU. No one slowly shuffling to the street seemed surprised. Even the facilities department seemed desensitized by the recurring issue. “If it’s not a real fire, we don’t even get involved,” said Mick Nelson, electrical supervisor in the facilities department. Laser beam sensors are part of the smoke detectors on the ceiling in the SMSU ballroom, and oftentimes innocuous things set them off. “Sometimes it’s because they let balloons go up in the ballroom,” Nelson said. “We’ve had that happen several times.” See fire alarms on page 5
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Irene coppa, center, an associate early childhood education teacher, plays magnets with Alhareth, left, and Yousif.
Proposed plans include short-term care facility Mary Breaden Vanguard staff
Change is in the air for students who receive subsidies for their child care costs from Portland State. Key stakeholders at the Helen Gordon Child Development Center,
the Associated Students of Portland State University Children’s Center, the Resource Center for Students with Children and the ASPSU student fee committee have been in talks to redesign the distribution of students’ incidental fees to prioritize giving direct aid to student parents who need help paying for child care—on and off campus. Now, students with children who
enroll their children in on-campus child care centers pay for care that has been significantly subsidized by student fees. Faculty and staff with children at HGCDC are billed a standard rate, but because student fees subsidize the center’s operation, those rates are artificially lower. In the future, that money will be shifted directly to student aid. The SFC is in charge of the roughly
$14 million in incidental fees that are collected from students along with tuition. The committee prepares a budget with these funds and then passes it along to the university president for approval. “We don’t have to subsidize entire programs,” said Nick Rowe, the chair of the SFC. “We want to be See Child care on page 2
Writer for hire PSU student ghostwrites essays for other students Ravleen Kaur Vanguard Staff
“I’ve always wanted to be a kind of modern Renaissance man,” he said. Speaking under condition of anonymity, “Tom” is a full-time student in his late 20s who has attended Portland State for two years, lives off campus and mostly keeps to himself. He is a musician, a graphic designer and an editor for a professional firm. He also writes, for a fee, essays and assignments for fellow college students. But he does not consider himself a ghostwriter. “I remember watching an episode of a little-known TV show…a drug-addicted townie wrote papers for the local college students. I guess that’s my vision of a ghostwriter, doing it as a service. I feel like I mostly just helped out friends and made a little extra cash,” he said. Tom enjoys the intellectual challenge of constrained writing assignments. “I tend to procrastinate on my own
assignments but am usually quite motivated to get an assignment done when it’s a friend’s grade on the line,” he said. The first assignment he ghostwrote was for a friend swamped with a heavier courseload than she could handle. She enjoyed his blog posts and approached him with the offer. “I understood that she wasn’t a slacker, and not even a bad writer, but she was overwhelmed,” he said. “I didn’t feel uneasy because she was a friend and needed some help.” He read the story she had been assigned—a short story about a man taken to the gallows to be hanged— and penned a paper that ended up being selected by the professor as a model for the class. “She offered me $100. I asked for something silly like $63.74 in exact change,” Tom said. But it was a close call. “My friend had hardly read the paper, so she apparently struggled her way through explaining ‘her’ paper,” he said. See ghostwriter on page 3
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Anonymous ghostwriter “Tom” doesn’t consider himself a hired pen. Rather, he sees himself as simply helping friends.