Sports, B4
Arts & Life, B1
UT keeps winning streak alive
Glass City grads
Independent Collegian IC The
Thursday, February 17, 2011
Serving the University of Toledo since 1919
www.IndependentCollegian.com 91st year Issue 39
Making Toledo a college town By Randiah Green News Editor and Managing Editor
After many years of talking and planning, the University of Toledo Foundation is embarking on a multimilliondollar project to give Dorr Street a “college town” setup. The foundation, in collaboration with Fairmount Properties, is looking to bring restaurants, retailers and services including hair and nail salons to 26,000 square feet on UT’s side of Secor and Dorr. They will start with moving the Barnes and Noble student bookstore from the Student Union Building. According to Matt Schroeder, vice president of real estate and business development for the UT Foundation, the bookstore will be 6,000
square feet, have two levels, and sell fiction and non-fiction books as well as text books and UT apparel. “We realized that in order to be successful we want to move away from the more academic model,” Schroeder said. “So this would be a place where students can go to get their bestsellers, their fiction and non-fiction books and technology such as ereaders. We’re also looking at having a café component to it.” The project will not be funded by the state or student dollars. Fairmount Properties will handle leasing to the businesses, and is in the process of finding retailers to sign onto the project. Illustration courtesy of UT Communications department
— Town, Page A4
The University of Toledo Foundation plans to revamp Door Street with a “college town” design in a multimillion-dollar project.
Lantern Festival celebrated Library fee being By Jennifer Ison IC Staff Writer
Jason Mack / IC
A Kongfu demonstration titled “China Dragon” is performed at yesterday’s Chinese Lantern Festival Celebration.
The Confucius Institute at the University of Toledo and the UT Initiative for Religious Understanding sponsored the second annual Chinese Lantern Festival Celebration yesterday. The festival included a lecture on Confucius by Weiming Tu entitled “Listening to Confucius” and several traditional Chinese performances by the Huazhong Normal University Performing Troupe. The university organizations held the festival to celebrate the Chinese New Year, which occurred Feb. 3., and to bring an understanding of China’s rich culture to Northwest Ohio. “Anyone interested in learning religion, philosophy and Chinese culture will come away from this event with a better understanding,” said Aige Guo, director of the Confucius Institute at UT. Tu is a lifetime professor of philosophy and dean of the Institute for Advanced Humanistic Studies at Peking University. He also holds the title of research professor and senior fellow of the Asia Center at Harvard University. He devoted his life to bettering himself through education, graduating with bachelors and masters degrees from Tunghai
University and receiving his PhD from Harvard. After earning his degrees, Tu began teaching Chinese intellectual history, philosophies of China and Confucian studies at several universities including his alma maters. He also taught at Tunghai and Harvard Universities, Princeton, the University of California in Berkeley, Peking University in Beijing, Taiwan University and the Ecole des Hautes Etudes in Paris. Tu’s extensive education and his experience living and teaching in China have made him an internationally recognized expert on Confucianism. “I became fascinated with the study [of Confucianism] when I was 14,” Tu said, addressing the high school students from six local schools who were invited to attend the event. Confucius was a political figure, scholar and teacher who was born in 551 B.C.E. in China; this was a chaotic time for the country with much social disintegration, according to Tu. Confucius developed and taught a philosophy on daily life that many people still adhere to today. “Confucius taught not only how to survive as humans but — Lantern, Page A4
applied to budget By Oreanna Carthorn IC Staff Writer
The Library Resource Fee on UT students’ bill is not used for buying new electronic resources at the library. The fee is used instead to sustain the current library budget. Many in the Carlson Library administration thought this new fee, applied in 2009, would serve as additional funding to expand the electronic resources offered through library services, but were disappointed to find this was not the case and feel the fee is being wrongly redirected into the general fees inaccessible to the library budget. Director of Library Services Marcia Suter said she did not know why the money from the Library Resource Fee was being redirected. “We’ve requested it several times through the usual budget processes and procedures and have always been denied,” Suter said. “As to why we never got it we do not know, because the original intent and what the student government had voted on and agreed on was to pur-
chase new electronic resources for the libraries.” Suter said without this additional funding the library couldn’t add new things that faculty and students wanted and requested. “We would have our regular budget, but we would just not get this fee that was originally intended to purchase new materials,” Suter said. Interim Vice President of Finance and Administration Scott Scarborough said the fee was never meant to pay for extra library resources. “The fee was there to sustain, not to add to the library funding because of the lost in state funding for the overall university,” Scarborough said. “That is what they need to understand.” “In the development of last year’s fiscal 2011 budget, we knew that we would experience the cuts in state funding from the state of Ohio, therefore we asked all operating units to prepare a cost reduction scenario, because we had to find ways to cut our expenses by the amount of money that the state cut its funding, and the library was — Library, Page A4
Toledo ranked No. 12 on Forbes most miserable list By Allison Seney IC Staff Writer
Toledo was recently ranked 12th in Forbes Magazine’s America’s Top 20 Most Miserable Cities, making the Glass City a little more miserable than it was last year. Forbes ranked Toledo as the 15th most miserable city last year. According to Forbes, Stockton, Calif. is the most miserable city in the nation. Toledo made this year’s list based on its 10.6 percent unemployment rate over the past three years. Economists predict Toledo’s
employment will not return to pre-recession numbers until after 2025, according to Forbes’ website. Toledo City Councilman George Sarantou said Forbes only measured the city’s level of misery based on unemployment and does not consider Toledo’s better qualities such as the Toledo Zoo, metro parks and universities in its ranking. Sarantou said every state was affected by the recession and recovery will be slow but Toledo does have plans for future development projects with the casino being the largest project to date. Other members of the commu-
nity feel Toledo was underrated. “If the people who wrote the article for Forbes lived here then they would feel differently towards Toledo,” said Lucas County Republican Party Chairman Jon Stainbrook. Lizz Lafond, a third year law student from Ann Arbor, Mich., said she believes the low morale of citizens adds to Toledo’s misery. “I think Toledo is underrated and I think that starts here in Toledo, where many residents don’t,” she said. “I feel that [Toledo] is an underdog city that gets a bad rap from people — Miserable, Page A4
File photo by Kevin Galambos / IC
Toledo moved from No. 15 last year to No. 12 this year in Forbes Magazine’s list of most miserable cities.