VOL. 51, ISSUE 12 | JANUARY 19, 2011
WWW.MACEANDCROWN.COM Student newspaper of Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, since 1930
In this week’s issue...
iPhone 4 comes Best of 2010 in to Verizonsee A2 music and film ODU/VCU see B1, B5 rivalry
TRANSITION TROUBLES SGA works through another challenging year in the 80th session by
Christian Ernst & Stuart Miller News Editor & Editor in Chief
The Student Government Association has had a difficult time transitioning over the last several semesters. This now being the 80th session, the administration has been working to stabilize themselves as the voice of Old Dominion University students. “I think we are doing very well considering the bylaw and constitution changes. That was a lot to adjust to; I’m glad we were able to take care of a lot of that over the summer,” said Speaker of the Senate Colin Rodino. “It took us a little while to get on our feet, because of officer transition, then there is the whole finding the direction of this session trying to make it as congruent as possible to the last session so we can keep consistencies.” Justin True, SGA president, concurred this message saying the transition period has definitely been a trying process in comparison to his time spent as the president of Pi Kappa Alpha Fraternity. True discussed the difficulties between running a fraternity, where the majority of the members are retained for the entirety of their collegiate career, whereas most SGA senators have only remained in seat for one session. “Because of all the work we did over the summer, we expected to hit the year a lot harder. We took a lot longer than we expected to get this thing rolling,” Rodino said. “We are really trying to get to operating capacity because it will make everything work more efficiently, but we have had trouble with recruitment and retention.” A few of the biggest changes to the organization include a new constitution and finance bylaws. Even SGA has struggled to adapt to these new bylaws as their budget has increased every year over the past four years. With the increase of the budget every year, each session has looked to enhance the resources for students on campus. True expressed that the organization has acquired many resources and the next step is publicizing these services to the student body. Some of these resources include the clicker system, used for voting within organizations, as well as a new tech rental system. “I think that we are providing more opportunity, but I feel like we need to publicize what we are actually doing more. I feel like we have had all these resources, but it’s really all about pushing those out to students,” said SGA Vice President Frankie Krimowski. “So a lot of this money and especially this increase in money has gone to those things and now it’s just sort of publicizing them and getting them ready and that’s where our big projects are. We have posters and all that stuff, all those have been made and ready to go and that’s probably where that money went.” One of the largest expenditures within the new budget is the rebranding efforts put forth by the newest session. The focus of this effort was a new website purchased from The Ivory Group LLC. True said that after originally getting a quote from California based firm that the organization was able to find a Small, Women, and Minority vendor which matched the quote. No other quote was re-
see C1, C2
ceived from other website firms. Although costing $10,000, the website provides many features to help ease the maintenance for the organizations while providing a way to reach out to students in a way that hasn’t been seen in several previous sessions. “I think that the website has potential, I think what we are doing now is fine tuning what we want the website to do,” Krimowski said. “I think initially we had great ideas and then when you finally get the website and get the product it transitions to designing the product to fit the students and I think what we are struggling with is ‘how do we get all our information into one complete website that isn’t overdone with just information and tech-rental and dvd rental, etc.?’ we need to find a way so the students aren’t bombarded with information.” Part of the new financial bylaws that came into effect last year state that any product or service that can be received for free from the school will not be funded by SGA, according to section II, B, 4 of the SGA financial bylaws, which can be found on the Office of Student Activities and Leadership website. One former SGA financial chair explained that this includes websites because the university provides website services for student organizations. “SGA, to the best of my knowledge, is not excused from bylaws, as they too are a student organization,” said one former SGA financial chair. “If [Justin True] read and understood the bylaws, he would have read where we do not pay for anything the school pays for. I am not sure if he was granted an exception by ODU though.” True explained that the website is back-loaded in a way where he described it as easy as “submitting an e-mail”. Instead of one webmaster maintaining the website, it allows the entire organization to easily manipulate the content on the website. The design makes it more likely for the website to operate for years to come according to True. True explained that although students had previously run their website development he felt that very few students could adequately create such a back-loaded website. Since there is no webmaster on the SGA payroll, the duties for several officers have increased, specifically the Chief of Staff. With this increase in duties comes an increase in the stipends of all of the SGA officers. The stipends total $32,000 out of a total of $82,000 for all organization’s stipends. The top three positions in SGA have all gotten an increase of $2,000, while the treasurer has gone from an unpaid to a paid position which now receives a stipend of $2,000. While the webmaster position was removed, the Chief of Staff now receives $3,000. “I believe that the increase is a good thing, not to say that SGA is the most important student organization because it’s not, it is however, in charge of all of the other budgets and I feel that because we have so much responsibility to the students and organizations that it’s better for us to have more wiggle room with the budgets because most likely it’s going to be spent on [student organizations] anyways,” said Rodino. “We do still do programming with other organizations and we do our own programming for other organizations. Those are the kinds of things we plan on doing; helping out other organizations with programming.” Despite the increases in their budget and the hassle of the rebranding process, SGA has been working rigorously to reestablish the organization as a credible entity on campus. The amount of work that has come from this session has shaped the landscape for the organization for years to come. As the session now heads into the spring semester, the administration will look now to increase the overall publicity of the organization as a whole.
WikiLeaks breaks into the news by Devon Mizelle Contributing Writer
Driving the growing movement for the desire to have transparency in government and companies worldwide is the ever elusive WikiLeaks. The organization strives to make confidential documents that possibly violate human rights or ethics available to the public. Over the past few months, WikiLeaks has been making diplomatic cables, or documents that ambassadors and other government officials create reporting back to their home country, available to the public that were once kept secret by the United States. Some of these cables show the country in what many believe to be a less than favorable, almost embarrassing, light as they criticize decisions made by other countries and their diplomats. Recently, founder Julian Assange has been in the cross-hairs of an international extradition campaign, a process in which an accused or convicted individual is deported to the accusing nation, in response to his organization’s ongoing divulgence of classified United States diplomatic cables. Assange is facing charges in Sweden on allegations of raping two women. BBC’s London branch reported on Tuesday that Assange “appeared … at Belmarsh Magistrates’ Court … and spoke only to confirm his name, age, and address, and his case was adjourned until 7 and 8 February.” In recent interviews, Assange has declined to comment on any details of the charges, even going so far as to terminate interviews prematurely and depart. The accusations are presented by two Swedish women, one of whom alleges that Assange had intercourse on her while she was asleep, which is considered rape under Swedish law. Assange’s defense group released a skeleton argument, a brief document that shows the points one will argue in acourt of law, recently showing what Assange will attempt to defend himself with. A British newspaper, The Guardian, released information from the argument. Assange’s defense team believes that there has been an “abuse of process” due to the fact that Julian Assange has not had access to all of the