TUESDAY
VOICES
IN SPORTS
The Order of Odd-Fish
Home, sweet home
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NSIT employee delves into young adult fiction.
Coming home to Ratner, wrestling wins UAA title and basketball goes 4–0.
FEBRUARY 9, 2010
CHICAGO VOLUME 121
AROON
ISSUE 26
CHICAGOMAROON.COM
The student newspaper of the University of Chicago since 1892
HYDE PARK
CRIME
Harper Court plans get off the ground
Vandals break into Harper weeks after robbers strike Classics quad By Amy Myers News Staff Intruders broke into Harper Library Sunday, weeks after the UCPD increased patrols to combat a string of similar crimes. Room 135 in Harper was broken into through a window between 1:30 and 7:00 a.m. Sunday morning, according to UCPD spokesman Robert Mason. He did not know if anything was stolen. The incident follows several thefts since December in which burglars targeted Goodspeed, Cobb, and Gates-Blake and made off with several laptops and computers. Mason said the Harper break-in was near enough to the other thefts to raise the possibility that they were
related. “It’s in the proximity. If it’s the same person, we do not know,” he said. “There’s intense investigation underway.” The Music, Film, and French departments, as well as the Center for the Study of Languages, were robbed over the past two months, prompting UCPD to increase patrols in Goodspeed between 7:00 p.m. and 7:00 a.m. Mason said those changes made the area secure and UCPD was not planning on any further increases. “It’s pretty intense over there with surveillance. We have security officers over there,” he said. The University said last week that it was considering adding afterhours card readers to some buildings or additional video surveillance in response to the thefts.
TRANSPORTATION James M. Plunkard, partner at Hartshorne Plunkard Architecture, reveals plans for the new Harper Court to community members at Canter Middle School Monday night. ERIC GUO/MAROON
Plaza will include movie theater, hotel, space for farmers’ markets By Adam Janofsky News Staff The new Harper Court will include a movie theater and a 200-unit hotel, Vermilion Development announced Monday when it unveiled its plans for the shopping center’s renovation. Vermilion, which was selected by the University and the city last month to develop the former commercial hub,
presented the plans during a Tax Increment Financing (TIF) meeting at Canter Middle School. The project, which will also feature retail stores, office space, and apartments, was influenced by comments solicited from Hyde Parkers over the past several months, Vermilion said. “We saw that Hyde Park really needs a good hotel,” project designer and architect James Plunkard said. “Our project includes a 200-unit hotel that will be at the development’s center.”
The design creates two new streets through Harper Court that will act as venues for events like the Hyde Park Jazz Festival. Their 30-feet-wide sidewalks will also provide ample space for farmers’ markets, designer Sophie Bidek said. Two apartment complexes and a condominium building will surround the two streets. An office building will be located at the corner of the development and an attached garage will help ease congestion. “We also pulled our building back to
HARPER COURT continued on page 2
Late-night shuttle may change hours after IHC vote, but will ignore safety concerns, SG says By Tiffany Young News Staff After the CTA reduced service for the #55 and the #6 bus routes Sunday, the University’s late-night South Loop Shuttle has become the only scheduled mode of transportation directly into Hyde Park after 12:30 a.m. However, Houses are requesting by a margin of two-to-one that the shuttle’s hours of operation be moved two hours earlier, with 60 percent of Houses responding
MEDICAL CENTER
DISCOURSE
UCMC team relieves doctors in devastated Haiti
Activist: Sex offender laws ignore threat of family molestations
By Asher Klein News Editor Twenty-two doctors, nurses, and specialists affiliated with the University of Chicago are traveling to Haiti to replace the first team sent there two weeks ago. “It’s hard to wrap your brain around the level of devastation,” said a doctor who landed in Chicago last night, one of the original eight staffers who left last month. Over 200 University of Chicago Medical Center (UCMC) staffers had volunteered by Friday to go to Haiti, according to a UCMC press release, and 22 will have arrived in Haiti by next Thursday. UCMC is working with other medical schools in Chicago to ensure hospitals at home don’t lose too many staffers at once. Eighteen physicians, nurses, physical and occupational therapists, a pharmacist, and an administrative worker will replace groups in the
in an Inter-House Council (IHC) vote. But some Student Government (SG) representatives believe the shift will detract from the shuttle’s intended use—a safe after-hours route to Hyde Park from downtown—while some students argue the change will make travel downtown more convenient. The shuttle leaves the Reynolds Club for the South Loop hourly between 9 p.m. and 12 a.m. and again between 1:30 and 3:30 a.m. The last bus leaves the
SHUTTLE continued on page 3
By Gergana Genkova News Contributor
small town of Fond Parisien, near the Dominican border, and a team working in Port-au-Prince, Haiti’s capital, the release said. Team leader and emergency medicine specialist Dr. Christian Theodisis will remain in Haiti until the end of February, a UCMC spokesman said. An assistant professor of medicine, Theodisis was one of the first UCMC doctors on the ground. An additional group of four plastic surgeons already scheduled to go to the Dominican Republic will perform reconstructive surgery on patients flown in from Haiti. Dr. Heather Costello, an attending physician at UCMC–affiliate North Shore’s emergency room, arrived in Chicago last night. “It was frustrating and horribly sad and overwhelming,” Costello said in a phone interview. “It’s unbelievable; it’s hard to wrap your brain around the level of devastation. It’s just thousands upon thousands of
Sex offender statutes often fail to protect victims while permanently stigmatizing the offenders, activist Laurie Jo Reynolds said Friday in a lecture at the Center for Gender and Race Studies. Statutes requiring the registration of sex offenders and restricting them from living in certain communities do not combat the more pressing dangers of unreported sexual offenses by respected community members, Reynolds said. Reynolds, an adjunct faculty member at Loyola University and an organizer of the prisoners’ rights group Tamms Year Ten, pointed out that repeat offenses make up less than 20 percent of sexual assault cases. More often, the perpetrators are not predatory strangers, but relatives or family friends whose offenses
HAITI continued on page 3
SEX OFFENDER continued on page 3
Activist Laurie Jo Reynolds discusses sex offender law Friday in a lecture at the Center for Gender and Race Studies. MATT BOGEN/MAROON