MIKKELSON
HARASSMENT
FOOTBALL
NEWS PAGE 2
OPINION PAGE 3
SPORTS PAGE 6
UNI says good-bye to Morris Mikkelson as he retires after 31 years of service.
Panthers heading to MVFC this Saturday to face off against Sycamores.
Columnist Cosgrove shares a recent experience and urges to stop LGBT hate crimes
Thursday
October 2, 2014 Volume 111, Issue 10
northern-iowan.org
Opinion Opinion 3X
Campus 4 Campus Life Life X
Sports 6X
Games 7X
Classifieds X 8
Paper cuts and prices
Drum the stress away
Why textbooks cost so much CASSIDY NOBLE years, according to the Staff Writer
ANDI KING/Northern Iowan
Students calm their nerves to the beating rhythm at The Drum Circle.
KAYLA KROGMAN Staff Writer
Gallagher-Bluedor n’s McElroy Lobby erupted Tuesday night with the thunderous wave of over 40 drums. The Drum Circle, or session of creative stress relief, was lead by Robert L. Friedman, M.A. in association with the 2014-15 Meryl Norton Hearst Visiting Artist Series. Friedman allowed the 40 plus participants to interact with one another through a series of their own individual rhythmic beats. Friedman’s goal was to provide the tools to help people relieve stress through drumming. “We live in a society that’s so electronic and so apart from each other, but the drums allow us to come together and speak with each other within a community,” Friedman said.
The excitement of starting a new semester is quickly diminished by sticker shock that occurs when looking at price tags of new textbooks. Millions of college students around the world feel the sting of paying ever-increasing textbook prices each year but what is causing inflated prices? The main shock of the final price tag can be broken into two branches: inflation and profit margins, according to the Huffington Post. The Post goes on to mention that textbook prices have risen 812 percent in the last 36 years. This outpaced overall tuition costs which has increased 559 percent in the same length of time. The rate of inflation in the textbook market has been exceeding 6 percent per year since the 1980’s according to research performed at Oregon State University in 2006. That is twice as much as the standard rate of inflation , which has been two to three percent per year on average. So why are they accelerating so fast? The average markup on a textbook is about 21 percent, which has stayed constant for the last 35
National Association of College Stores (NACS) A hidden fact is that only 11.7 percent of a textbook’s profit goes to the authors while the majority of profits, about 77.4 percent of the book’s cost, go to the publisher. Since 2008, NACS no longer receives a breakdown of how the costs work out. Part of this is due to an unregulated balance of supply and demand, according to an article by Student Public Interest Research Groups in a Business Insider Article “In the textbook industry, no such system of checks and balances exist,” the article said. “The professor chooses the book, but the student is forced to pay the price. Without the ability of the student to choose a more affordable option, publishers are able to d r i v e prices
higher without fear of repercussion.” Textbook companies give away books to professors, which is another contributing factor to the unregulated checks and balances. “Yes, we professors get free books,” said Todd Pettigrew, Associate Professor at Cape Breton University in his blog. “Publishers’ representatives see that you are teaching [a course] so they send you the new [course] book that they’ve just published, hoping you will order it for your students the next time you teach the class.” College students are the individuals who end up shouldering the brunt of the price increases since they cannot divert the costs of both the increased specialty knowledge as well as the primal factors of the increase.
See TEXTBOOKS, page 2
ERIN KEISER/Northern Iowan
Vaccines do not cause Autism
BRETT IRVING
Opinion Columnist
For scientists there is no argument but for the public there seems to be controversy about vaccinating their children. The issue at hand took off when Dr. Andrew Wakefield (England) published a paper that showed eight children had developed autism-like symptoms from the MMR vaccine. The MMR vaccine is given to fight measles, mumps and rubella. Scientists worked through the study only too discover multiple problems. The first being a lack of a control group. The importance of control groups in the study would have shown whether or not the symptoms were a result of the vaccine or another unknown cause. The other problem was that the study only used eight children (that’s right eight). Tens of thousands of children receive vaccines each month; using only eight children isn’t an accurate sample size. The third problem with the study was that the doctor claimed intestinal inflammation caused encephalopathic proteins to enter the blood stream, which caused autism. This is the biggest problem because in some of the children, the intestinal inflammation occurred before symptoms began to show. See VACCINES, page 3
See DRUM, page 4
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