The Miami Student Oldest university newspaper in the United States, established 1826
TUESDay, FEBRUARY 26, 2013
VOLUME 140 NO. 41
MIAMI UNIVERSITY OXFORD, OHIO
TODAY IN MIAMI HISTORY In 1930, The Miami Student reported that 11 men had been arrested on various charges of possession, selling and transporting intoxicating liquor, and one
was arrested for gambling, in a series of raids made by federal, state and county officers. The raid was under the direction of Mayor H. Rodabaugh and involved three crews of officers. Wilford “Hoot” Selves, of the Gray Taxi Company was called and asked to deliver whiskey to an empty farm. When he arrived, he was arrested for transportation and possession.
Miami makes the call for more emergency phones By Reis Thebault
For The Miami Student
The 12 yellow emergency phone kiosks scattered around campus are outdated and one-dimensional, Miami University has found. IT Services, in conjunction with the Miami University Police Department (MUPD), Miami’s Physical Facilities department and Associated Student Government (ASG) will begin to phase in 30 better-equipped emergency boxes this summer to foster a safer campus environment. Each box will cost $10,000 and will come out of IT Services’ budget. The current boxes are about 15 years old and serve only one purpose: the ability to summon emergency help or an escort when needed, according to IT services. According to Chris Bernard, director of network engineering and telecommunications in IT Services, the new emergency boxes will have a plethora of features that are absent in the current models. “One feature of the new phone, that the old phones don’t have, is a wire broadcast system, which means in the event of a tornado warning or other warning, the phone boxes will be able to emit that warning,” Bernard said. This feature allows emergency warnings to be broadcast around campus through a speaker in the box that can be heard from 500 feet
away, according to Bernard. Lt. Ben Spilman, spokesperson for MUPD considers this PA-like system paramount to campus safety. “The outdoor warning features are something we don’t have on campus and would bring a new layer to our emergency warning systems here,” Spilman said. The new models will also have the capability to call MUPD for help at the press of a button, just as the current ones do. However, they were unable to solve the problem of prank calling, which happens regularly, according to Spilman. “We get a lot of false alarms, where we will show up and there will be no one there,” Spilman said. The updated models are supposed to be much more aesthetically pleasing, in contrast with the stout, yellow boxes. “They are one of the few remaining eyesores,” Bernard said of the old emergency boxes. Bernard described the emergency boxes that Miami plans on installing, likening them to similar devices on other college campuses. “The new ones will be much larger, about 10 feet tall, and will have a blue light on the top of them, which will hopefully make them very identifiable,” Bernard said. Another drawback of the current models, Bernard said, is because they’re becoming increasingly
outdated, it’s difficult to find replacement parts, as they are no longer being manufactured. The boxes themselves aren’t the only things that are behind the times. “Some locations are kind of outdated because of construction on campus,” Spilman said. “With future development on campus, some of those current call boxes are not in the best locations.” In an attempt to rectify this situation, Spilman said that Physical Facilities hired consultants to produce a campus circulation master plan. This plan, available online, highlights the areas that students most often frequent in order to place emergency phone kiosks in appropriate areas. The new emergency phone kiosks will also double as Wi-Fi access points, projecting a 400-foot radius of wireless internet coverage that will allow strengthening of signals in green spaces and remote areas, such as Western Campus. “For the campus population, the addition of outdoor WiFi is going to be really attractive as well,” Spilman said. “That is certainly a neat feature.” However, all parties concerned are quick to acknowledge that while additional features will be
EMERGENCY, SEE PAGE 9
RYAN HOLTZ THE MIAMI STUDENT
BLADES OF GLORY
The Senior Synchronized Skating Team preforms its competitive long program at the national sendoff exhibition held Saturday at the Goggin Ice Center.
Sleep deprived students struggle to sustain lifestyle By Katie M. Taylor Campus Editor
Miami University students find themselves caught in the nationwide struggle to find enough sleep. According to the 2012 National College Health Assessment (NCHA) survey of 76,481 undergraduate students from 141 universities, 22 percent of students reported sleeping difficulties severe enough to have a negative impact on their academic performance. Miami senior Yerine Lee, who gets three to four hours of sleep per night, said she falls in that demographic. According to Lee, the transition to a college environment worsened her pre-existing sleeping difficulties. “In the beginning I had so much work to do,” Lee said. “I guess now, this year, I’ve gotten more used to not sleeping much and even if I’m not doing work it’s just continuously like that.” According to Lee, the lack of sleep has taken its toll. “In class I can tell I’m definitely not at my full potential,” Lee said. “There were a few times when I was taking exams that I dozed off during, so I feel like my performance at school could be a lot better than it is.” Assistant Director of Health Education, Leslie Haxby McNeill, said students who fail to get enough sleep are setting themselves up to face the impossible. “For students who are trying to achieve academically, and I suspect many students are also trying to hold down a job or have a lot of involvement, to be able to function optimally is not going to happen if you are chronically sleep deprived,” McNeill said. An eight-hour sleep schedule is ideal, though many students see that as an unrealistic goal, McNeill said. “I’ve heard students say sleep, study and social life; you can have two, but not all three,” McNeill said. “I would really advocate for students to really try to look at a more balanced lifestyle. When a person is younger they sometimes feel like they can ‘get by’ with less sleep, but really there is no age you can.” Lee confirmed this mentality and said the balancing act often becomes a struggle for students. “I feel like there’s always something going on [at Miami], especially at night also,” Lee said. “It’s so easy for me to just [go out] … There are a lot of times when I tell myself I’d rather do this than just go to bed and miss out.” According to McNeill, the
constant battle often results in substance use—people forcing their bodies to do things they weren’t meant to do. “Some students resort to more extreme measures, for example, using prescription drugs in a way that’s not prescribed,” she said. “Those are the kinds of things that can become very detrimental.” On the other hand, some suffer from sleeping difficulty severe enough to be prescribed sleeping aids. Sophomore Kit Collins is one such student. For Collins, it’s the irrepressible thoughts at the end of the day that keep him awake long after he begs for rest. “When I lay down in bed that’s when I do my thought process,” Collins said. “That’s when I’m like, ‘Okay lets figure out everything that happened today.’ That’s what I started doing when I was young, and it became a terrible habit and developed into insomnia.” Collins can relate to the 6 percent of students surveyed in the NCHA who reported having been diagnosed with, or treated by a health professional for insomnia or another sleeping disorder. According to Collins, a normal dose of a sleeping aid is around three to five milligrams, but due to the degree of his insomnia, doctors prescribed him 25 milligrams of Ambien CR. “I was getting high after taking so much of those drugs and I still couldn’t sleep,” Collins said. After failed attempts to treat his insomnia, Collins said he began to realize substances weren’t the answer. “Those [prescribed] drugs help you get to the place where you can fall asleep, but it’s still about the mental process of putting your worries away, putting [expletive] out of your head,” Collins said. “One of the things I do now, when I’m having a really rough night, I count backwards from a thousand using sevens.” Though Collins no longer uses sleeping aids, Lee said she knows students who do. According to her, it’s also common for students to take Adderall, a prescription stimulant, to stay awake for both studying and partying purposes. “I know a lot more people who if they don’t get enough sleep take Adderall or something to stay up … ” Lee said. “I think a lot of people realize that’s not how you are supposed to solve the problem, but they might
SLEEP,
SEE PAGE 9
Secret GLBTQ group founder, alum returns to campus for lecture By Britton Perelman For The Miami Student
Miami University alumnus James Lopata (’86) began an underground support group for homosexual students in a time when he and other students felt they could not be openly gay. Thursday, Lopata will return to Miami to discuss his experiences.
LOPATA
Lopata is the editor-in-chief of Boston Spirit, an LGBT magazine in New England. The Rochester, N.Y. native has dabbled in a wide variety of career paths including off-Broadway, professional singing, new media marketing and digital consulting. “For me, one of the hallmarks of my career so far is that I just follow what’s interesting and do what excites me,” Lopata said. Lopata, who began as an interdisciplinary studies major at Miami, will speak with students about his college experiences, both in general and as a homosexual student who went through the process of coming out while at Miami. The university Lopata will be returning to this week is quite different than it was when he was a student here almost 30 years ago. Today there are multiple LGBTQ student organizations on campus, as well as
an established department dedicated to advising students, which is part of the Office of Diversity Affairs. In 1986, the only LGBTQ group on campus was a radical for the time activist group that disbanded after less than a year, according to Lopata. During Lopata’s senior year, after talking in-depth with his head resident advisor, Lopata began the process of coming out to his friends. In the midst of a process he described as just plain scary, and despite being initially met with an uncomfortable reaction from his best friend, Lopata found an unlikely friendship with someone he never expected to. Lopata’s friend Christine came out to him at the same time. At the time, the two had virtually nowhere on campus to turn for support. Together they decided to create something like a support group called Chameleon. The group met in secret once a
week in the basement of the counseling center and began with only Lopata and Christine. Chameleon sparked the creation of many of the LGBT organizations on campus today. Lopata returns to Miami in part because of an innate fascination with his Midwestern alma mater, in the hopes of spurring conversation and discussion among students. “My hope is that [the students] get sort of a sense of perspective,” Demere Woolway, coordinator of GLBTQ services at Miami, said. “I think sometimes it’s easy for students to think, ‘oh it’s always been this way.’ And to just sort of look back and see how things have developed and how things have changed since he’s been on campus, and then to also recognize that we all have a place in this movement.” Lopata said Initial reactions to
his news of coming out, struggles with his faith and loneliness were all obstacles he had to overcome. But, in more ways than one, he said Miami proved to be incredibly helpful to him. “The values that were instilled in me at Miami, those kind of values like the importance of relationships and family, have stuck with me, so that as I’ve gone on to work in some gay activism and then gay journalism, is to watch how many activist movements can flare up,” Lopata said. “And there’s a place and time for shouting and yelling and protesting, but there’s also a time and place for those kind of values that I feel were really impressed on me at my experience at Miami University.” Lopata will be speaking with students 4 p.m. Thursday in Upham Hall, room 163.