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Tuesday, February 18, 2014*
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UNIVERSITY
Faculty discusses museum funding By Julia Brouillette @juliakbrou
Faculty Council unanimously passed a resolution requesting the Texas Memorial Museum’s community outreach activities be financed independently from the University at its meeting Monday. The museum, which is
set to lose approximately $600,000 in funding this September, currently subsists on a mixture of state and University funding, as well as giftshop sales and donations. “The museum does provide an education resource for a number of UT classes, including signature classes,” said William Beckner,
mathematics professor and chair-elect of Faculty Council. “Over a thousand UT students benefit from this.” Such financial independence would allow the museum to continue its educational role within UT and the region, according to Beckner. “Our first priority should be the education of
students,” Beckner said. Faculty Council also discussed the response from vice president and chief financial officer Kevin Hegarty to a resolution passed at its last meeting that requested more information about the Shared Services plan. The Shared Services Plan calls for the centralization of
University human resources, finance, procurement and information technology services. According to UT officials, the plan also calls for the elimination of 500 jobs, which will take place primarily through natural attrition and retirement.
BUDGET page 2
CAMPUS
Peta2 sets up tents for animal rights By Adam Hamze @adamhamz
On Monday, peta2, the youth division of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, set up a tent in Gregory Plaza that exhibits the treatment of animals in factory farms in an attempt to persuade students to take action against animal cruelty. The tent, which is open from 10 a.m.-3 p.m. Monday through Wednesday, contains graphic pictures and descriptions of the ways animals are treated, leading up to their slaughter. The tent was organized by peta2 but was partly staffed by members of Students Against Cruelty to Animals, a UT student organization. Volunteers outside the booth asked students walking by to view the exhibit, offering free food and merchandise to those who entered.
PETA page 2
Michelle Toussaint / Daily Texan Staff
PETA’s youth division demonstrates to students how animals are kept in factory farms by displaying graphic pictures and descriptions outside of Gregory Gym on Monday afternoon.
bit.ly/dtvid
POLICE
Thieves nab MacBooks, loss valued at $54,947 By Jordan Rudner @jrud
More than $50,000 worth of new Apple MacBooks were stolen from a secured storage area in the Main Building at some point between Thursday and Friday morning, according to campus police records. UTPD spokeswoman Cindy Posey said she could not elaborate on how many computers were stolen or on the availability of surveillance footage in the Main Building because a police investigation is currently under way. According to a UTPD Campus Watch alert, the $54,947 worth of technology was removed from a storage area on the first floor of the Main Building. Police crime logs record that the burglary happened at some point between 5 a.m. Thursday and 1:10 p.m. Friday, when the theft was reported. A campus watch alert issued Monday by UTPD narrowed the possible time of burglary and said it did not occur later than 7 a.m. Friday. Posey and University spokesman Gary Susswein declined to provide any additional details about the event. Student workers in the Office of the Registrar and the Office of Admissions, which are both located on the ground floor of the Main Building, said they had not heard about the theft.
UNIVERSITY
CAMPUS
Eighth MOOC opens despite low retention
Graduate student leads deaf research
By Madlin Mekelburg @madlinbmek
On Tuesday, the University launched its eighth massive open online course — better known as MOOC — “Effective Thinking Through Mathematics,” which will be taught by mathematics professor Michael Starbird, “The real goal of education is to get people to be better thinkers, so that’s the goal of the course,” Starbird said. “I think one of the most important things a person can learn is how to think deeply over a longer, extended period of time, when you don’t have a bunch of things coming in.” According to Starbird, his MOOC has been in development for a year, and he has filmed more than 50 hours of content for the course. Starbird said one of his biggest challenges was finding an engaging way to present the material. “It’s not exactly thrilling movie productions,” Starbird said. “We were joking about inserting a car chase to keep
Michael Starbird
Mathematics professor
people’s attention.” Starbird said he approached his MOOC as an experiment, focusing on the interactions between himself and his students. “I sat there with [two or three] students on either side of me and I would pose a question — either a mathematical puzzle, problem or concept — and have them work on that mathematical issue, and I would comment as they were working about strategies of thinking,” Starbird said. “I don’t know the extent of which
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By Nicole Cobler @nicolecobler
Winning Miss Deaf America in 2010 didn’t just mean a new title for graduate student Rachel Mazique — instead, the victory set her onto an entirely new career path. Mazique’s involvement in the deaf community put her on the path to teaching an undergraduate English course in sign language and dedicating her research to the culture of the deaf community. Mazique, who grew up in a mixed deaf and hearing family in Arlington Heights, Ill., said she first came to the University as a student because of its resources, which eventually led her to focus on deaf literature as another form of ethnic literature. “I have a transatlantic focus, as I’m working with both British and American deaf literature, and examining the literature in relation to American [and] British internal law, social justice and bioethics,” Mazique said in an email.
Jarrid Denman / Daily Texan Staff
Deaf instructor and UT doctoral student Rachel Manzique teaches deaf literature at the University. Manzique plans to become an English professor.
Mazique said her interest in pageants began in 2006 when the Illinois Deaf Latino Association asked her to be in its inaugural pageant, which she won. In 2009, she competed to become the Miss Deaf Illinois Ambassador, and was sponsored to the National Association
of the Deaf Conference in 2010. “I was so happy to achieve this goal, so deciding to participate, not ‘just for fun,’ but to serve my community, worked best for me,” Mazique said. Mazique became a graduate student at UT with the
intent to research Chicano literature, but was eventually drawn to her current focus in deaf literature after taking courses in the English and communications department. After she graduates from
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