50% chance of Scattered Thunderstorms HIGH LOW 84 74
Freshman defensive tackle ruled eligible for fall football camp.
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Thursday, August 20, 2009 Issue 02
E D I T O R I A L L Y
PUBLISHED SINCE 1906
S T U D E N T
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http://dailybeacon.utk.edu
Vol. 112
I N D E P E N D E N T
The International House wraps up a week of activities with the Beyond the Borders party.
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Residence hall closures provide new benefits Robby O’Daniel Chief Copy Editor
Scott Martineau • The Daily Beacon
Rooms in Melrose Hall serve as practice studios for both individual and group performers while the Music Building undergoes renovations this semester.
Students might not call them home anymore, but the university continues to use former residence halls, with more plans for them in the future. Melrose Hall and Greve Hall are becoming “surge” spaces, which designates them as available temporary space while other renovations are taking place, said Betsey Creekmore, associate vice chancellor in finance and administration. Creekmore described the process of finding space for everyone while also updating buildings on campus as complicated. “It’s like a huge jigsaw puzzle, but fortunately no one person has to put it together,” Creekmore said. “But it’s all put together trying to make the resources of the institution stretch as far as they can and as well as they can.” Art studios were moved into Melrose Hall during the summer, and when the Music Building goes under renovation in the fall, individual performers and ensembles will use the space available in Melrose for practice, she said. The architecture in Melrose Hall, full of smaller rooms previously used as singles for student housing, saves the cost of converting the rooms to practice rooms. Administration can station individual performers in every other room, so that musicians do not hear music from adjoining rooms through the walls. “We’re getting Melrose ready to receive music, so we cleaned it out and made some very minor modifications like changing over the security system,” Creekmore said. “And we took two walls out for music professors because the height of the ceiling in Melrose was very low.” Greve Hall will soon play host to some with research grants, as well as perhaps governor’s chairpeople, she said. Unless the grant required a minor remodeling effort, Greve Hall should stay the same, she said. “We’re not going to do a massive renovation of Greve Hall,” she said. “It’s in pretty good shape.” Examples of research work that would call for
minor renovations might include taking out some walls to provide a classroom-size or workroomsize space that a Greve Hall dorm room does not provide or modifying the wire infrastructure to support heavy electronic use for computational work, she said. Unlike its peers, Strong Hall will not be used as “surge” space because of its lack of air conditioning and elevators, she said, though the longterm planning for Strong includes the migration of the entire anthropology department to the former residence hall. The expendiency of the planned renovations for the hall hinges on capital outlay funding, which she said did not come for the project last year. The hall remains the home of Sophie’s Place cafeteria. The university is updating the fire safety of some current residence halls with new sprinkler systems, Mike West, associate director for Facilities and Services, said. The systems were added to Humes Hall and Reese Hall over the summer, and plans are made to add systems to the Apartment Residence Hall in the fall and North Carrick Hall and South Carrick Hall in summer 2010, West said. After that, all the university residence halls will have sprinkler systems. “Any fire safety expert will tell you that having a fire-suppression system, whether it be in a residence hall or a home, is the best prevention to property damage and life safety that you can have,” he said. The Apartment Residence Hall also will have its hot-water system get a facelift when the individual, 30-gallon water heaters are taken out in the fall and replaced by hot water from the UT steam plant, West said. As students’ demands call for more apartmentstyle housing, Volunteer Hall and Laurel Apartments have risen up, taking the place of other older dormitories like Strong Hall, Melrose Hall and Greve Hall. “People want their own individual bedrooms and their own private space,” West said.
UT initiative educates students on perils of poverty Ellen Larson Staff Writer
Kristian Smith Student Life Editor After visiting seven continents, 55 countries and 50 states, Smokey has completed his journey across the world. The “Where in the World is Smokey?” challenge began two years ago. It was initiated to bring attention to Ready for the World, an effort to diversify UT. As part of the challenge, the students, faculty and staff who participated were given free T-shirts. In return, they took pictures of themselves in the T-shirts as they traveled to other states and countries. Then they submitted their pictures to the blog on the Ready for the World Web site. “There are hundreds of photos on the Ready for the World Web site,” said Amy Blakely, assistant director of media relations. “Smokey has been everywhere: the Vatican, coming out of a space shuttle, beside lions in Africa, festivals in Tennessee, Times Square, pyramids in Egypt, Acropolis in Greece, Honduras, and it all ended in Mississippi with Marshall Ramsay, a former cartoonist for The Daily Beacon and a Pulitzer Prize finalist. Ramsay even wrote a cartoon about it.” Sarah Gardial, vice provost for Faculty Affairs, said “Where in the World is Smokey?” is part of the Ready for the World initiative and is comprised of two big pieces. “The first part of ‘Smokey’ is getting students ready for the global world with a focus on students being abroad, and the second part focuses closer
to home on the fact that we recognize a lot of diversity within the community we live in,” Gardial said. “We want students to ‘Think global, act local.’” The second phase of the “Smokey” program —named “Volunteers Rock the World”— is similar to the first “Smokey” program. Participants request a free Tshirt and take a picture or video while volunteering. “(We want to) get students engaged with folks that are different from themselves and focus on outreach,” Gardial said. There is a specific focus on poverty and teaching students how to reach out to underprivileged, socio-economic groups in the second phase of the Smokey program, Gardial said. Jeannette Walls, author of this year’s Life of the Mind book “The Glass Castle,” was very in tune with this idea because her book dealt with poverty, she said. Ready for the World also will bring in Joe Clark, the Eastside High School principal portrayed in the 1989 film “Lean on Me,” to talk about dealing with poverty, Gardial said. Participants will be able to get more involved in the second phase of the program, Blakely said. They can do this by becoming Facebook fans of “UTK Ready for the World.” From there, they can post videos and pictures of their volunteer work, as well as watch and comment on the videos and pictures of other fans. Many students on campus are starting to get involved with the new program, Blakely said. See Smokey on Page 3
Scott Martineau • The Daily Beacon
The sun sets on Neyland Stadium the first day of the reopening of Philip Fulmer Way since the end of football season.
Forbes includes UT in top rankings Amanda Crider Staff Writer This year Forbes magazine included UT in its list of the best 600 colleges in America. Ranked No. 422, UT-Knoxville is in the top 14 percent of four-year public and private universities in the country, dropping 94 positions from last year’s rankings. “I’m really impressed UT was in the Forbes rankings,” Ian Davis, sophomore majoring in biology, said. “It shows the school is in the top tier of universities in the nation, yet it still leaves room for future improvement.” According to the Forbes Web site, the college rankings are decided using seven components of differing weights, including alumni in the 2008 edition of Who’s Who in America (12.5 percent), salaries of alumni provided by http://www.PayScale.com (12.5 percent), evaluations from http://www.ratemyprofessor.com (25 percent), four-year graduation rates (16.6 percent), students receiving nationally and internationally competitive awards (8.33 percent), faculty receiving nationally and internationally competitive awards (5 per-
cent) and four-year debt of student borrowers (20 percent). Although the categories remain the same from year to year, this year the percentages placed upon some of the categories were either raised or lowered, which could have had an effect on UT’s ranking. The biggest changes in the weighting process were the
reduced components of faculty awards and alumni in Who’s Who, in favor of an increase in the four-year loan debt and alumni salaries components. The increase of emphasis on four-year loan debt in particular could potentially be one of the causes of UT’s decline in the rankings. According to the Common Data Set provided on the Web site of the Office of Institutional Research and Assessment, 51 percent of UT students borrowed money at some point through a loan program. The average debt of a UT student who borrowed money at any time through any loan program during 2008-2009 was $24,690. Nancy Waller, research coordinator at the Office of Institutional Research and
Assessment, said another potential reason for UT’s drop in the rankings could be the emphasis on the four-year graduation rate. At the university, the percentage of undergraduate students who graduate in four years is 30.6 percent. The five-year graduation rate for undergraduates is 55.5 percent, and the six-year rate is 59.8 percent, meaning 41.2 percent of undergraduates at UT-Knoxville either take more than six years to graduate or simply don’t graduate at all. Despite UT’s slide in the Forbes rankings, Chancellor Jimmy Cheek said in a press release that he is honored Forbes magazine considers UT among the top universities in the nation. “The selection criteria — education quality, student experiences and alumni and current student achievements — is a wonderful snapshot of life at UT,” Cheek said. “We strive for excellence in these areas each day, and this recognition is a great honor.” In addition to the Forbes rankings, the Center for College Affordability and Productivity named UT 70 out of 100 on its Best Value Rankings. The CCAP assists Forbes each year in its data compilation and compiled its own rankings by comparing school quality to the cost of tuition.