“TEDsex” talk coming to Portland Upcoming event will feature discussion of human sexuality NEWS page 2
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Portland State University WEDNESDAY, JULY 24, 2013 | vol. 68 no. 05
Provost’s Challenge awards $3 million in grants
CPSO talks security as reports of violence against women spike
Funding to go toward campus updates Gwen Shaw Vanguard Staff
Last November, Sona Andrews, the provost and vice president for Academic Affairs at PSU, announced the Provost’s Challenge, a subset of the ReTHINK PSU project. The challenge award recipients were announced as spring term was coming to an end and received a shared total of $3 million in grants to help the advancement of Portland State. The project initially started with the Provost’s Challenge, which Andrews said was put together to see how technology could be used to change some of the curriculum at PSU. A competition was announced to award projects and proposals that would push the university in a more tech-savvy direction. After the announcement, it quickly became clear to Andrews that there was broad interest throughout campus to “rethink” PSU. “That’s how ReTHINK came about,” Andrews said. “The idea is that it’s more than just the awards for the Provost’s Challenge that are being made. It’s really about the greater…widespread use of technology in order to deliver programs more effectively, more inexpensively, and to provide greater access.” The Provost’s Challenge was divided into three categories: reframing, acceleration and inspiration. See Challenge on page 9
Corinna Scott/VANGUARD STAFf
CPSO DetectivE MATT Horton is trained to deal with sexual assaults on campus.
Main concerns center around crimes committed by nonstudents Ravleen Kaur Vanguard Staff
In recent months, media coverage of sexual assault toward women at Portland State has been on the rise. From incidents of inappropriate sexual touching earlier this year to two recent cases of physical harassment and assault in campus elevators, many wonder whether violence toward women on campus is increasing.
Throughout 2012 to early July of this year, the PSU Campus Public Safety Office issued seven timely warnings related to incidents of violence or sexual harassment toward women. This seemed to mirror the previous year’s number; in 2011, eight incidents of forcible sex offenses on campus occurred, up from four in 2010 and two in 2009. All of the attackers were nonstudents
unaffiliated with the university; all of the victims were women. The vast majority of assaults from 2009–11 took place in residence halls. All of these cases occurred between people who knew each other and did not relate to issues of building access. CPSO said that a rise in reported offenses does not necessarily reflect an increase in actual cases. “We know that sex crimes are grossly underreported [by victims],” CPSO Chief Phil Zerzan said. A 2006–10 Justice Department survey found that 54 percent of sexual assault cases go unreported.
According to a 2012 Centers for Disease Control report, 19 percent of undergraduate women in the United States have experienced attempted or completed sexual assault since entering college. Women aged 20–24 experience the highest rates of rape and sexual assault, according to the report. “We aggressively investigate these [cases],” Zerzan said. “I want persons who commit these crimes to go to jail, and thus far we’ve been successful.” In the five sexual assault and abuse cases that gained recent media attention, See Violence on page 2
Egyptology lecture sheds new light on lost history Brown University professor discusses recent expedition
Professor Laurel Bestock recounts her work studying ancient Egyptian fortresses in Sudan.
MattHEW Ellis Vanguard Staff
Miles Sanguinetti/VANGUARD STAFf
Brown University’s Dr. Laurel Bestock visited Portland State last Thursday to give a brief lecture in Smith Memorial Student Union detailing her recent archaeological work in Sudan researching several ancient Egyptian fortresses that were last excavated during the 1930s. About 50 guests attended Bestock’s lecture, which was co-sponsored by the Oregon Chapter of the American
Research Center in Egypt, a nonprofit organization based in Cairo that assists scholars in the Middle East and spreads cultural awareness with local chapters in the United States. The lecture was also sponsored by PSU’s Middle East Studies Center, founded in 1959 as the first federally funded undergraduate program for Middle East studies in the country. “We were very excited to welcome Dr. Bestock,” said John Sarr, president of the Oregon Chapter of the ARCE. “As an assistant professor at Brown working in both Egyptology and archaeology, she is really doing some great work.” Bestock’s lecture focused on
recent studies of a series of Egyptian fortresses around the Nile River in Sudan, which were long believed to have been destroyed in 1964 after Egypt built the Aswan Dam. The dam redirected the Nile and created a large reservoir, Lake Nasser, across the Egypt-Sudan border, which covered a number of ancient Egyptian fortresses with a blanket of water. “I did my senior honors thesis on these fortresses,” Bestock said, “and I would sit in the library and cry—literally cry. This was the late ’90s, and at that time we See lecture on page 3