THE MIRROR
Student-run newspaper
Week of September 11, 2013
www.fairfieldmirror.com fairfieldmirror The Fairfield Mirror
Vol. 38, 39, Iss. 23 2
REMEMBERING A CHRONICLE OF FAIRFIELD’S RECOVERY
9
Faculty wants Mentor By Exnhi Myslymi Associate News Editor
Twenty-five Fairfield faculty members, including some who have retired, signed a letter asking to fully restore Mentor for faculty and students. One week before classes started, faculty was informed by Chief Information Officer Paige Francis that Mentor’s course management system would shut down due to security concerns. Considering Mentor’s importance to Fairfield, “the timing and lack of faculty input to the decision to shut down Mentor should give everyone cause for great concern,”
said Accounting Professor Dr. Dawn Massey. Francis said, “Unfortunately, the issues only came to light the week before fall semester started so the decision was really disruptive for the faculty to prepare for the students coming in.” Author and creator of the Mentor Course Management and Assessment and co-founder of Axiom Education Dr. Curt Naser said he received an email on Aug. 22 from Francis with specific security concerns. These included faculty being READ MENTOR ON PAGE 3
By Luigi DiMeglio Managing Editor On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, Director of Public Safety Todd Pelazza was seated at his desk. Larri Mazon, director of multicultural relations at the time, went to Pelazza’s office to tell him about an incident in New York. Mazon had a large TV in his office and they proceeded to watch history unfold. By about 10:30 a.m., Fairfield University had closed its gates and manned the front entrance to campus with an officer. Off-duty officers were called in. “I vividly remember that day,” said Pelazza, “One of the things that still strikes me is the weather. It was a crystal clear day with literally not a cloud in the sky. “Whenever there’s weather like that today, it still sends a chill down my back.” In 2001, it was school policy for student residences to have landlines. There was no StagAlert system. Calls came pouring in to the Department of Public Safety office from students unsure what to do. Pelazza had been at Fairfield for almost 10 years at that point, but the situation was unprecedented. Disaster planning had been done, but nothing quite applied to 9/11. The closed gates and checkpoints remained for more than a week after that cloudless Tuesday. “Because of our location, we knew there would be students affect-
ed,” said Pelazza. ResLife, Campus Ministry, Counseling Services, DPS and others in the campus community began their search for whom Fairfield might have lost. The World Trade Center had many people working there every day that it had its own zip code. At the Office of Alumni Relations, Janet Canepa ’82 began combing through files for alumni that were listed under the WTC zip code. When they were found, their home telephone numbers were called. Canepa remembers what some of those calls were like. “You know, you could hear that there would be a lot of people over the house and the house would calm down [when the phone call started]. … They were there to console.” It took until the month of October 2001 for the school to determine that 14 alumni perished in the attack. One of Canepa’s classmates, Patrick McGuire ’82, was at work on the 84th floor of 2 World Trade Center. McGuire was about to evacuate the building, but an announcement over the building intercom said the situation was under control, so he resumed his work at Euro Brokers, Inc. His long-time friend and Fairfield classmate, Michael Murray ’82, had made it down to the 40th floor of that building, but was on his way back up when a plane slammed into floors 78 through 84. READ STORY ON PAGE 4
"It is hard to see that there is any plausible claim of a “security emergency” of the sort that would justify forcing over two hundred faculty, 500 courses and 4000 students to change week of class ... Because the CIO has failed to demonstrate any legitimate security concerns with the Mentor system, we call upon the CIO to immediately reinstate faculty and student access to Mentor." Faculty members want Information Technology Service to bring back Mentor
Loan Le/The Mirror
News:
Opinion:
The Vine:
Sports:
FUSA to announce
Student critiques action in
The Levee gets Nauti
Fall sports preview
fall concert
Syria
Page 3
Page 5
Page 7
Page 16