INSIDE
Where to find late night snacks Track and field dominates TCU Bad skin care leads to cancer
Doh fired. PAGE 2
PAGE 3
PAGE 3 PAGE 4
MONDAY
MARCH 19, 2012
MONDAY High 75, Low 57 TUESDAY High 64, Low 52
VOLUME 96 ISSUE 71 FIRST COPY FREE, ADDITIONAL COPIES 50 CENTS
Student Fees Skyrocket SMU among highest in student fees for peer universities NATALIE POSGATE Contributing Writer nposgate@smu.edu Marika Wynne expected to go through four years of college when she entered SMU in the fall of 2009. But after a conversation with her academic advisor last spring, something changed: she’s graduating in three years instead. “I wish I could do a victory lap, but it’s just not cost effective,” said Wynne, a senior dance major who has been taking an 18-hour load each semester in order to graduate this spring. Tuition is the dominant reason that Wynne cannot afford a fourth year at SMU, but she said the general student fees also played a large role in her decision to
graduate early. SMU charged its full-time, undergraduate students $4,440 in student fees this year, yet administration won’t provide a specific breakdown for where the money goes. This amount is, for the most part, thousands of dollars higher than all 24 of SMU’s peer universities, leaving Wynne and other students wondering what they are paying for. A visit to the SMU website does not completely answer this question; nor does an inquiry to administration. Administrators will give a vague breakdown, but there is nothing in writing that gives students a numerical dissection of where the fee money is allocated. “While we don’t release specific
lists, student fees cover a broad array of activities and campus programming that are key to the SMU student experience,” SMU vice president for business and finance Chris Regis said in an email. “General fees fund various programs and activities on campus such as the HughesTrigg Student Center, Dedman Center for Lifetime Sports, student association programs and intercollegiate athletics.” Most of SMU’s peer universities numerically break down student fees on their websites. For example, student fees at Notre Dame are $507 for the 2011 to 2012 school year. Fees include a $250 technology fee, a $150 health center access fee, a $95 student activity fee and a $12 Observer
fee (the student newspaper). Notre Dame has the third lowest fees among SMU’s 12 peer benchmark universities. “Our fees are broken down and right now we think that’s the right thing to do,” said Joseph Russo, director of student financial strategies at Notre Dame. “Transparency, especially today, is expected from consumers.” Dan Fulks, an accounting professor at Transylvania University in Lexington, Ky., agrees that fees should be transparent, but not necessarily from a consumer standpoint. “Some people refer to students as consumers, but I don’t agree with that at all,” Fulks said. “I think the university has some responsibility to tell you what it’s
doing with the tuition [and fees] that you’re bringing in… it’s a little bit of a different situation than going to Best Buy and putting some money down on something. The money [students] put into supporting the university is not just the cost of them attending.” When asked why SMU student fees are the highest out of its peers, Regis said in another e-mail that “some schools place more emphasis on tuition versus fees,” and that SMU falls in the middle of its peers when looking at the combined cost of tuition and fees. Dartmouth College is one of the peer benchmark universities that matches this description. This year, tuition at Dartmouth is $41,736 and student fees are $1,260, compared to SMU’s
$34,990 tuition and $4,440 student fees. Like Notre Dame, Dartmouth provides a breakdown on its website for where student fees are allocated. Ron Hiser, Dartmouth’s director of student financial services, acknowledged that while the combined amount of tuition and fees at Dartmouth totals higher than SMU, transparency is crucial since college is a pricey investment. “I don’t know that I can completely understand the reasoning to say it’s right or wrong [to not provide a breakdown],” Hiser said, but “I know if that was going on here people would want answers … at least we’re
See FEES page 6
POLITICS
ACADEMICS
Perry vows to fight for voter ID law
SMU tries to adapt to changing plagiarism world
RAHFIN FARUK News Editor rfaruk@smu.edu Rick Perry has not turned into a lame duck governor after his failed run for the Republican presidential nomination. The governor criticized the Justice Department’s decision to block a law that would have required Texas voters to present government-approved IDs in order to vote. Proponents of the law say that it will help limit voter fraud and increase transparency in elections. “During the testimony that was in front of the Texas legislature this last session, we had multiple cases where voter fraud was in various places across the state,” Perry said to FOX News on Friday. “I think any person who does not want to see fraud believes in having good, open, honest elections. One of the best ways to do that is to have an identification so that you prove who you are and you keep those elections fraud-free.”
For Perry’s administration, the issue also boils down to one of states rights. Angered by the Justice Department’s intrusion on Texas politics, Perry vowed to fight for the voter ID law all the way to the Supreme Court. “We are going to have to spend a lot of money and time defending our right to make sovereign decisions from this administration,” Perry said in the same FOX News interview. But the Justice Department stated in its decision last week that the issue was one of civil rights by stating that the law failed to prove “that the proposed changes have neither the purpose nor the effect of denying or abridging the right to vote on account of race or color or membership in a language minority group.” Minority activists argue that the law might prevent Hispanics and other racial minorities from voting. “More than 15 percent of Hispanics do not carry the forms of identification required by this law,” Abigail
Olvera, a politics major at the University of Richmond, said. “It would severely limit minority participation and help Republicans unfairly win elections.” Republicans from across the nation are questioning the motives of the Justice Department while liberal-leaning organizations are garnering support from multiple sources. The United Nations Human Rights Council is currently investigating the legitimacy of American voters laws in Geneva, Switzerland. The Texas voter ID law is having some of the same fractious effects at SMU. “It’s not the Justice Department’s place to block a state issue. State-issued ID’s are required to drive, purchase alcohol, and get on a plane, so they should be required in order to cast a vote to determine this country’s political future,” Zane Cavender, a Republican and SMU sophomore, said. Many SMU students agree,
See PERRY page 6
CHASE WADE Managing Editor cdwade@smu.edu As ever changing as the online landscape is, administrators and professors alike are implanting new strategies and technologies towards electronic plagiarism detection. SMU uses Safe Assign, an extension of Blackboard that runs student’s papers through a vast database of records and then prints out a report that highlights possible places of plagiarism. As an avid user of this technology, SMU political science professor Chelsea Brown has had mixed experiences with the teaching tool. “Safe Assign’s not perfect,” Brown said. “I started using Safe Assign the first semester I was here, but it was very finicky… mainly in its functionality.” Brown elects to use Safe Assign not just with term papers, but instead for every type of writing assignment she assigns. With every paper submitted
through Safe Assign, students receive an electronic timestamp that proves that a copy of the paper was turned in. This eliminates possible professor error in regards of losing physical copies. “I think there is a fair amount of student reassurance with Safe Assign,” Brown said. SMU’s prime proponent of Safe Assign is Brad Boeke, the school’s Director of Academic Technologies. A large part of Boeke’s job is to provide faculty, staff and students direct support for Blackboard technologies. Boeke is currently forming a group of faculty, staff and students to make the school’s experience with Blackboard better. “Safe Assign’s got mixed reviews from the faculty,” Boeke said. “The way to make Safe Assign more effective is to submit more work into the database.” As SMU’s prime liaison to Blackboard, Boeke has seen a number of problems with the software.
In one extreme case, Boeke recalls Safe Assign taking almost a week to generate a report that would normally take three to four hours. The problem was later attributed to too many papers being turned in at the same time on Safe Assign’s servers. Even though Safe Assign is set into place, some students fail to even realize that they are plagiarizing. Brandon Bub, a sophomore English major, notices that plagiarism has many definitions. “There are also some rules about plagiarism that aren’t always clearly explained,” Bub said. “If a student were to write a paper and then cite something from a previous piece the student might have written, there are a lot of professors who would consider that plagiarism.” With electronic resources growing exponentially, electronic plagiarism is conversely growing as well.
See PLAGIARISM page 6