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Daily Egyptian MONDAY, AUGUST 18, 2014 VOLUME 98 ISSUE 83
#SIUC18 hashtag grows in popularity Kia Smith
Daily Egyptian
Instead of waiting to arrive on campus to figure things out, students utilize tips given on social media to make their transition from high school to college easier. Twitter is a way for incoming freshman to meet other students, connect with Registered Student Organizations and find useful information about the university, specifically by using the hashtag #SIUC18. The #SIUC18 hashtag has been tweeted more than 2,000 times this year, according to Tweet Binder, and has allowed new students to interact with people before arriving on campus. Alexander Martin, advisor of Student Programming Council, said SPC decided to utilize Twitter because of how swiftly information can be distributed throughout the site. “Twitter is a community,” Martin, a graduate assistant for the University Programming Office, said. “The best part about it is that you have multiple hashtags that expand across the world.” Martin said hashtags enable students to get to know their entire class before they get on campus. “Incoming freshman created their hashtag,” Martin said. “That’s how they know who they have classes with, what events are going on around campus and which RSO’s are the best to join. … This hashtag or any hashtag for that matter is more than just that, it is a community that connects you with so many, and can possibly open up so many doors of opportunity.” Shaneice Bufford, a sophomore from Carbondale studying biomedical science, said Twitter was helpful to her during her first year. “Whenever I needed help finding a building or finding out what events were going on around campus or Carbondale, I automatically went to Twitter,” she said. As a member of Vanity Fashion Fair Models, Bufford said the organization uses Twitter to recruit new members. “Since the RSO Fair is coming up, we’ve been doing a lot of heavy promotion on Twitter as well as Instagram, because both platforms give us a chance to be seen by plenty of people,” she said. The hashtag #SIUC18 has been posted more than 950 times on Instagram, according to data gathered from the site. Demetrios Layne, a senior from Itasca studying sports administration said Twitter enables him to get the word out about his business. “Twitter allows me to reach as many individuals as I can, instead of going out to talk to them one by one,” he said. “Twitter is swift and it’s beneficial.” Layne, former president of the RSO Speaking and Teaching, said Twitter was responsible for helping recruit new members and for receiving large turnouts for their events. “Before Twitter, or any social networking site, we as students had to work really hard to find out what was going on,” Martin said. “These days, staying aware is as simple as opening up your phone and scrolling down your timeline.”
I an M ullen
D aIly e gyptIan
Ivan Vargas, a senior from Brooklyn, NY., studying ecnomics, eats a slice of watermelon Sunday during round two of Watermelonfest 2014 sponsored by New Student Programs. Vargas and his teammate ate 22 pieces of watermelon in one minute.
Interim chancellor adjusts major policies Luke Nozicka Daily Egyptian
Interim Chancellor Paul Sarvela is not wasting any time making changes to campus policies. In less than one month, five policies have been changed, including continual appointments, as opposed to one-year contracts; the hiring of retired faculty and staff; allowing head researchers of a grant to be in charge of the money they’ve been awarded; more overhead recovery money distributed throughout campus and hiring decisions being made without the chancellor having to sign off on them. Sarvela said these changes have been made because he is trying to create a “strong dean model and strong vice chancellor model,” and decentralize critical decision making on campus. “My management philosophy comes down to you hire good people and let them do their work,” Sarvela said. One-year contracts were implemented by the previous administration last year, and Sarvela said it is hard to have people commit to a job at the university with that policy. “It’s real difficult to hire a chair of a department from let’s say, Central Michigan or something like that, when we say, ‘Well, you’re going to be on a year-by-year appointment,’” Sarvela said. “It makes people feel there’s more job security.” Cameron Shulak, president of the Undergraduate Student Government, said students will benefit from the change in hiring retired faculty and staff. “In aviation, our department chair just retired and is going to come right back on and start to do some part time teaching,” Shulak said. “People like that
have such a wealth of knowledge and a wealth of experience that it’s crazy not to consider them for those positions.” Sarvela said another change is allowing the principal investigator of a grant— someone who writes a proposal and leads an academic project—to be the fiscal officer once again. He said a department chair or dean can still be the fiscal officer if the principal investigator chooses to not take that position. “If you brought in a half a million dollars, gee whiz you outta have a say in how to spend it,” Sarvela said. Rachel Stocking, president of the Faculty Association, said this policy is very important for people who do research on campus. “There was a lot of unhappiness that was changed by [former-Chancellor Rita Cheng], and there were people who saw it partly as an attack method on the position of the people who were applying for the grants,” Stocking said. “But also more of a diminishing of the importance of research in general. … People viewed it as a very unbeneficial policy.” Another policy modification Sarvela has made is how much overhead money the chancellor’s office receives when a grant is written. Sarvella said he has reduced the rate from 40 percent, implemented about two years ago, back to 30 percent, as it was before the previous administration made this change, allowing more money to go to other campus operations, such as the Graduate School. Sarvela stated in a memo sent out July 16, nine percent of overhead recovery allocated from the chancellor’s office had been returned to the vice chancellor’s account, and 2 percent had been returned to the School of Medicine. The chancellor’s office has made
an effort to streamline paperwork as well. While there is not a memo for this policy, Sarvela said it “takes forever to hire someone here.” He said it shouldn’t take two weeks to hire a cook. “I don’t know if we need to have a cook in the cafeteria, but the great people at housing and the vice chancellor in charge know if we need to have a cook in the cafeteria,” Sarvela said. “Doggone it if we need to have a cook in the cafeteria, go and hire them.” Shulak said Sarvela sat down with about seven constituent heads of the university as soon as he was appointed acting chancellor to discuss changes on the campus. “He set in our hands right there the immediate changes he wanted to make, which I was really impressed to see,” he said. “There’s a lot of stuff that faculty and staff and students as well had continually expressed concerns about and he addressed some of those right away.” Shulak said at the first meeting of the semester on Aug. 26, USG will discuss policies unfavorable to students, such as the 20-hour work cap implemented by former administration. “From what I’ve heard that is something no students want,” he said. “I’m not sure what contact the previous administration had with the provost on that but I definitely want to take it up as a subject of conversation and see again what the reasoning was.” Sarvela said he and Susan Ford, recently appointed interim provost and vice chancellor of academic affairs, have discussed changes to other policies, which will be announced in the future. “We have every belief that people will be happy about the additional changes we’re proposing,” he said.
Missouri governor emphasizes investigation into shooting death Chuck Raasch
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
WA S H I N G TO N — Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon, in television appearances Sunday, repeatedly emphasized the role of the federal investigation over the local one in the shooting death of Michael Brown. He said St. Louis County, Mo., Prosecuting Attorney Robert McCulloch, who has publicly criticized Nixon’s decision to send the Missouri Highway Patrol into Ferguson, has an opportunity to “step up here and do his job.”
Nixon appeared on four morning talk shows, and shortly after his last appearance the Justice Department announced that it would order its own autopsy _ separate from that conducted by local authorities _ of Brown, 18, who was shot and killed Aug. 9 by Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson. Coming after a night in which seven arrests had been made a midnight curfew was broken, Nixon said that his conversation on Thursday with U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder had led to the deployment of 40 more FBI officers to investigate the shooting.
“That is the kind of independent, external national review and investigation of this that I think will assist everyone in making sure we get to justice,” Nixon said on CNN’s “State of the Union.” But Nixon was far more measured when asked about the local investigation being led by McCulloch, who has faced criticism and calls for him to step aside. McCulloch last week said Nixon’s decision to turn security over to the Missouri Highway Patrol was “shameful” and “disgraceful,” and that it had been done without consulting local police.
Nixon, asked about those characterizations on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” called McCulloch “a seasoned prosecutor that has an opportunity to step up here and do his job.” Nixon said he did not know how long the investigation would take. “I will let the prosecutor speak for himself on what his time frame is, other than I know when I talked to Attorney General Holder that the response to that was to bring 40 additional agents into the region to accelerate those interviews,” Nixon said on CNN. “Everybody is working really, really hard. ... To get justice it
has to be transparent justice, it has to be thorough justice.” Nixon said on ABC’s “This Week” that his office was unaware that Ferguson Police Chief Thomas Jackson was going to release on Friday a video showing what is alleged to be Brown, 18, in what police have called a robbery in a convenience store shortly before he was killed. “We were certainly not happy with that bring released, especially in the way that it was,” Nixon said. “It appeared to cast aspersions on a young man that was gunned down in the street. It made emotions raw.”