Daily Egyptian TUESDAY, APRIL 21, 2015
Budget cuts could eliminate programs
DAILYEGYPTIAN.COM
SINCE 1916
VOL. 99 ISSUE 49
Pondering at the pond
tyler daviS | @TDavis_DE Gov. Bruce Rauner’s budget cuts could diminish programs that give students professional experience and Carbondale residents affordable mental healthcare. Officials at SIU’s Clinical Center were asked to prepare a budget for the organization if it were to lose 50 percent of its state funding. The exercise was prompted by the university after Rauner proposed a 31.5 percent cut of state appropriations to public universities. The center is a training facility for students in clinical psychology, communication disorders and speech, education psychology and social work, and also serves community members. A 50 percent cut of the center’s state money would mean $206,705 would be lost out of its roughly $406,000 budget. Holly Cormier, director of the center, said state money and the fees it collects for the services it provides make up all funding. “State money just pays the salaries of the staff,” she said. “The money we make [from fees] pays for the electricity. We have to pay for our students’ computer, phones.” The fees also cover other operational costs, such as training kits for students. The center has eight professional paid staff members, and about 65 graduate and master’s students across four programs annually train at the facility. About 200 clinical appointments are made per week. Please see CLINIC | 3
Panel: Grassroots activism to end sexual assaults Sam Beard | @SamBeard_DE Top SIU administrators participated in an open forum Tuesday to urge students to be more active in preventing sexual assault on campus. The town hall style meeting was hosted by the It’s On Us student task force. The task force is SIU’s chapter of an initiative started last year by President Barack Obama, which aims to end sexual assault on college campuses. The 11-person panel spoke of a muchneeded paradigm shift that changes the way society thinks about and combats sexual assault. SIU President Randy Dunn said students can put an end to sexual assaults. “This is not something you can start by administrative dictate,” Dunn said. “This is the type of movement that has to emerge from the grassroots.” Andres Lopez, a sophomore from Round Lake studying automotive technology, acknowledged Dunn’s request and said he will bring the message home to his fraternity. “Student have a big influence on other students,” said Lopez, a member of Phi Iota Alpha. “I will try to influence my [fraternity] brothers to pass it on.” For more on this story, please see www.dailyegyptian.com
H oliday W agner | @HolidayWagnerDE Mickey Everett, a graduate student from Los Angeles studying mass communication & media art, reads a book Wednesday by Campus Lake. Everett said he wanted to get out and enjoy the warmer weather.
Students gift flowers to save bees Sam Beard | @SamBeard_DE April showers bring May flowers and habitat destruction is killing our bees. Some students are trying to increase awareness of dwindling wildflower populations in an effort to help restore bee communities, as the two are intrinsically tied to one another. Students Embracing Nature, Sustainability and Environmentalism, or S.E.N.S.E., is a Registered Student Organization that is giving away hundreds of free native flowering plants Tuesday and Wednesday from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. in the Faner Hall breezeway and outside Lawson Hall. Members from S.E.N.S.E. will be gifting flowering plants — such as Purple Cones, Black Eyed Susan’s, and several species of milkweed — to anyone who wants one. “All three of those are good for attracting bees and butterflies,” said Sedonia Sipes, associate professor of plant biodiversity and conservation biology. “But the bees are doing most of the pollinating.” Sipes said most native plants and food crops are insect-pollinated. “Without pollinators we won’t have a lot of flowering plant species that are important in wild ecosystems, as well as cultivated plants that are important to us,” she said. “The most important pollinator are bees — by far.” Pollen and nectar are food for bees, providing protein and energy. Without wildflowers or cultivated varieties in their place, the bees will die because of the destruction of their floral resources and nesting regions. Sipes said many people blame companies such as Monsanto, who produce herbicide and genetically modified crops, for collapsing bee communities, but they are not the only factor. “All bees tend to be very sensitive to pesticides,” Sipes said. “[However] the most important problem facing our native bees is
e llen B ootH | Daily Egyptian Tricia Walker, a junior studying plant biology poses for a portrait with a butterfly weed plant, Monday in the Horticulture Research Center Greenhouse. Walker is the president of Students Embracing Nature Sustainability and Environmentalism, or S.E.N.S.E. The organization gave out free plants in the Faner Hall breezeway from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. Monday and will do the same Wednesday in front of Lawson Hall from 11 a.m to 2 p.m.
probably habitat destruction.” Sipes said that row cropping — growing cops like corn in rows to allow for mechanical cultivation — can render land void of the wildflowers pollinators need for survival. “There are ways you can do agriculture and leave little fragments of native vegetation,” Sipes said. “But a lot of times, it is not done that way.” Tricia Walker, a junior from Palatine studying plant biology, said native species are both beneficial to pollinators and ecosystems as a whole. “Illinois used to be covered in prairie, now there is less than one percent of the prairie that used to exist,” said Walker, who is president of S.E.N.S.E. “This used to be a really big pollinator hot-spot.” She said because of the large amount of corn grown in Illinois, bees do not have as many
plants to pollinate as they once did. Walker said bees are responsible for 70 percent of fruit production, and if we lost them the plants would need to be pollinated by hand, steeply driving up the labor cost of producing fruits. “It’s estimated that bees do millions of dollars [annually] of free labor for people involved in fruit production,” she said. Besides costing people millions, if bees go extinct it could change human life. If the bees die off, the earth will struggle to maintain its current population and supermarkets will only have half as much produce as they do now, according to BBC. Sipes said students can plant native flowers and refrain from mowing the wildflowers in their lawn to encourage a prosperous bee community.
@dailyegyptian Interim Provost Susan Ford’s open forum interview for the chancellor vacancy will occur at 8:45 a.m. Tuesday.