Stick it real good Orange and Blue Exhibition begins No. 1-ranked reigning champs’ season SPORTS, 1B
The Daily Illini
Monday December 10, 2012
www.DailyIllini.com
The independent student newspaper at the University of Illinois since 1871
GEO passes University’s new contract BY TYLER DAVIS STAFF WRITER
The Graduate Employees’ Organization voted Friday to ratify the new contract proposed by the University bargaining team Nov. 27. The vote passed overwhelmingly by more than 95 percent, said GEO spokeswoman Stephanie Seawell. The GEO, which has been fighting for protection of tuition waivers throughout a seven-month negotiating period, secured the waivers in the five-year contract. “Hopefully through all of that, the administration has come to the understanding that tuition waivers are very important to graduate students in order to maintain diversity and the best graduate students on campus,” Seawell said. Both the University and GEO have expressed that they are pleased that they reached an agreement after negotiating for a new contract since April. Three weeks prior, GEO members had assembled a strike committee. “We’re delighted to have reached agreement with the GEO, and we will circulate the agreement for the appropriate signatures to finalize it,” said campus spokeswoman Robin Kaler in an e-mail. Without the language on tuition waivers, Natalie Uhl, member of the GEO’s bargaining unit and graduate student, said she would not have voted to bring the then-tentative agreement to the membership. “I think that the stability of a five-year contract is really good, and knowing that tuition waivers will be secured for that amount of time is a big weight off of our shoulders,” she said. Seawell said the GEO negotiated with four pillars in mind — tuition waivers, fair and living wages, health care and access and equality. “We didn’t get everything in all the categories except in tuition waivers, but we did get some gain in every category,” she said. Uhl said she feels the GEO
Vol. 142 Issue 71
! Accommodations for nursing mothers, protected by Illinois law ! Nursing mothers are to receive unpaid time to breastfeed or pump and are to be provided a space that locks other than a bathroom stall ! Easier for a member to go through grievance process when not getting proper accommodations than to charge University with discrimination using an outside process ! Language in the bereavement leave section that preserves domestic partnerships for samesex and opposite-sex partnerships MICHAEL BOJDA THE DAILY ILLINI
Illini Chabad hosts a menorah lighting event Sunday afternoon on the Quad, celebrating the second night of Hanukkah.
made great progress in regards to access and equality during bargaining. The non-discrimination statement has now been expanded to include protection from harassment from supervisors, also including more categories of what is defined as harassment. In addition to the contract, the University came out with a side agreement in which the University administration agreed to abide by the Illinois Educational Labor Relations Board’s ruling regarding violations of the previous contract. Those violations came in 2010 when the University reduced waivers for graduate students in the College of Fine and Applied Arts. The University has agreed to repay affected assistants with 7 percent interest. The GEO is now working to get a list of those members together, Seawell said. The side agreement was also ratified Friday. Uhl said there’s still a lot of work to be done on campus. She said the GEO is working
Feds order temporary LEX shutdown that the company has followed all safety regulations. “That’s what the Department of Transportation is supposed to do — to come in, identify problems that need to be corrected and have you correct those problems,” Frazier said. “That is what you call government regulation. But this is what you call government destruction, not regulation.” Frazier also owns the bus company Illini Tours, and he said that the company has not received any unsatisfactory ratings from the safety administration. He said he was confused by the results of the inspection. “It has the same drivers, the same mechanics — we can take any one of my LEX buses and use it for the Illini Tours,” he said. “But if I put the word LEX on it, I made it illegal.” Frazier said he expects to hear back from the agency by the end of the week. “It’s terribly frustrating,” he said. “They are acting like I’m some murderer out there taking students and just crashing buses into buildings.”
BY CARINA LEE STAFF WRITER
Lincolnland Express, more commonly known as LEX, bus company was ordered to temporarily shut down operations Friday by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration. The company is currently awaiting approval of a safety management plan that it created to correct violations that led the company to receive an unsatisfactory safety rating Oct. 22. The shutdown deliberation came a week after the company submitted the 600-page plan. The safety administration will have up to 30 days to decide whether the plan meets its criteria, according to a news release from FMCSA. The violations include false reporting of records, use of buses that were not periodically inspected and failure to properly maintain vehicle parts and accessories. Robert Frazier, owner of LEX, said the violations came as a result of a misunderstanding and said he feels confident
See GEO, Page 3A
2A
According to data from the Department of Transportation, 47 percent of inspections of LEX vehicles over the last two years have revealed violations that must be corrected before being allowed back on the road. Students have been affected by the shutdown already. For students like Alexa Loufman , a student at DePaul University, who had expected to take a LEX bus this weekend, the temporary closure became an obstacle. Loufman, who visited the University over the weekend, said she received a phone call from LEX telling her the company was halting business because of federal code. LEX told her they would refund the ride, but Loufman was still disappointed and had to arrange for her own transportation. “I wished they would have told me sooner about their business, so I could have bought another ticket from another company.”
Carina can be reached at lee713@dailyillini.com.
UI researchers use rat cardiac cells to create ‘bio-bot’ technology BY AUSTIN KEATING STAFF WRITER
University researcher Rashid Bashir’s “bio-bot” only moves at a top speed that spans the width of three human hairs each second, but the part-robot, partheart-cell hybrid could move the emerging field of synthetic biology further into the future. The 7-millimeter-long robot was made using a 3-D printer out of materials similar to those in contact lenses. The biobot combines biology and engineering by having a mechanical structure that is propelled by the beating of cardiac cells from rats. Project leader Bashir, University professor of bioengineering and electrical and computer engineering, said the team’s long-term goal is to develop a multicellular structure that is capable of doing more than any individual cell can. “The eventual goal is to try to integrate multiple cell types so can we think about neurons and muscle cells and other types of cells (to) really think about building systems that start to mimic little organisms that we can fabricate,” Bashir said.
STAFF WRITER
Police
FREE
Select tenets of the GEO agreement
BY CLAIRE EVERETT
INSIDE
|
Lighting the Candles
Beyond Coal supporters rally to urge University to divest in coal Beyond Coal ralliers chanted that no more coal is their goal at the Alma Mater on Friday. Members of the Beyond Coal campaign, an initiative of the registered student organization Students for Environmental Concerns, encouraged the University to cut all investments in coal industry-related companies. While the University has contended that it does not directly invest in such companies, members of the campaign like Katie Mimnaugh, graduate student in NRES, are concerned about indirect investments as monetary donations to the University’s endowment fund that are private. “The whole University system has $2.6 billion in its endowment, and we do not know how much of that is feeding the fi lthy machine that is destroying the lives of our neighbors and friends,” Mimnaugh said.
High: 35˚ Low: 23˚
CLAIRE EVERETT THE DAILY ILLINI
Nina Youssefnia, left, and Florence Lin, right, both sophomores in LAS, watch the speakers at the Beyond Coal rally in front of the Alma Mater podium on Friday. Donald Kojich, vice president for marketing and communications, said he could confi rm that there are no direct investments in the industry. “At the present time, we do not hold direct stock in coal,” said Donald Kojich, vice president for marketing and communications. “That’s not to say that we won’t in the future. There’s no policy in place that disallows direct investment in companies that support fossil fuels.”
A
|
Horoscopes
2A
|
This policy is what the Beyond Coal members, along with the Illinois Student Senate, are advocating for this year. Last Wednesday, the Illinois Student Senate passed a resolution that encouraged the University to create that policy. Tyler Rotche, Beyond Coal president and sophomore in LAS, said the next step is to introduce this at the Board of Trustees meeting in January, so all three University of Illinois campuses could
Opinions
4A
|
be in compliance. So far, Hampshire College and Unity College have achieved the goal of getting their schools to divest in coal. “Saying we don’t directly own stock in coal is almost like saying I’ve never killed anyone, but I’ve hired hitmen to do it for me,” said Clark Bullard, retired professor in Mechanical Science and Engineering, who spoke at
Crossword
See BEYOND COAL, Page 3A
5A
|
Comics
5A
|
Sports
1B
|
Classifieds
Vincent Chan, graduate student in Engineering, designed the bio-bot with Bashir. Chan wrote a manuscript for the project, which was published in the online journal Scientific Reports on Nov. 15. Chan said he and his team explored a mostly uncharted area of biological engineering — synthetic biology. “Traditionally, bioengineering is more, for example, developing medical devices doctors can use to help their patients. ... We are going in a little different direction,” Chan said. “Now we are taking biology and using it for new functions that aren’t really present in nature right now. We’re using it to kind of improve nature.” Bashir said multicellular biobots can potentially be used as mimics for organs, for drug screening and also as a way to detoxify fluids. The team is part of the National Science Foundation Science and Technology Centers’ organization and received support for the project through a $25 million grant from the foundation, Chan said. It was distrib-
See BIO BOTS, Page 3A
4B-5B
|
Sudoku
4B