SERVES UP CIRCLE OF HELL
Freshman Rosario has provided a spark for women’s volleyball team SPORTS | PAGE 8
Creed’s new LP, Full Circle, is a full-on disaster DIVERSIONS | PAGE 6
THE DIAMONDBACK THE UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND’S INDEPENDENT STUDENT NEWSPAPER
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
Our 100TH Year, No. 41
College costs, aid availability climb rapidly Officials University’s costs remain more than $2,000 above nation-wide average BY BEN SLIVNICK Senior staff writer
The university bucked a national trend of rising college costs last year, as tuition and fees at most public universities soared while costs stayed relatively stable here. Still, according to a report the College Board released last week, the university’s costs remain above national averages. Even as in-state students here enjoy a fourth straight year of a tuition freeze, they still pay $2,215 more than the average student attending a four-year public university. And this comes after a year when in-state
students at public universities nationwide saw their tuition and fees jump 6.5 percent. University administrators, national experts and lawmakers at all levels of government have decried the rising costs, but the College Board report offers a glimmer of good news: As fast as tuition and fees have shot upwards, grant aid has increased at even faster rates. “Looking at the published prices is very deceptive,” said Sandy Baum, the senior policy analyst who wrote the report, “Trends in College Pricing 2009.” “The increase in grant aid has been much more rapid than the prices that
defend diversity plan draft
AN EDUCATION’S COST Students at this university pay $2,215 more than the average student attending a four-year public university. At public universities nationwide, tuition and fees jumped an average of 6.5 percent for in-state students. The average public university fulltime student received $5,041 in grant aid last year.
see COST, page 3
THE FLYING SEED
Committee will revise document based on town hall feedback
MACHINE
BY MARISSA LANG Senior staff writer
The first draft of the university’s new Diversity Strategic Plan is far from perfect, university officials admitted. After an initial draft was released Thursday, students charged the plan with being too vague, lofty and dismissive of certain underrepresented populations, including graduate students, international students and the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community, among others. “This whole diversity plan is frankly a big joke,” Graduate Student Government President Anu Kothari said. “It is called managing diversity, as if diversity is some sort of errant child. Diversity should be celebrated. You don’t need to manage it.” Even as students balked at the plan’s goals, officials emphasized it was nowhere near finalized and said they will gauge community reaction to the plan and its proposals at an open town hall meeting being held in the Stamp Student Union this afternoon. They will make changes accordingly. “We’re going to take in everything everybody says,” Assistant to the President for Equity and Diversity Rob Waters said. “What’s in the plan is one idea, but we’re very open to hearing other things. Sometimes, people have better ideas than we do.” The plan, which has drawn criticism in the past for not effectively representing student concerns, will be redrafted following the town hall discussion, Waters added. Members of the steering committee charged with
Univ. researcher designs ‘monocopter’ based on path of falling maple seeds BY AMY HEMMATI Staff writer
For more than 60 years engineers have been trying to understand the physics behind one of the most elegant motions in nature: a falling maple seed. Graduate student Evan Ulrich, who has been studying the motion since 2005, created a palm-sized monocopter (a single-engine helicopter) that is able to replicate the seed’s mysterious spiraling fall. This weekend, Ulrich presented his invention at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum’s annual Air and Scare event. “It was such an honor to be able to take my own flyer to the
museum — I felt very privileged,” said Ulrich, doctoral candidate in aerospace engineering. “A curator asked for a vehicle, and it is my hope that it will make it into the museum.” The university started researching miniature air vehicles ten years ago, when Darryll Pines, the current dean of the aerospace engineering department, was just a professor. “The researchers tried to scale down full-sized helicopters to understand the physics of how they work,” Ulrich said. “Most of their rotorcraft looked just like small helicopters, and they didn’t work.”
see MAPLE, page 3
GRAPHIC BY SHAI GOLLER/THE DIAMONDBACK
see DIVERSITY, page 3
University hopes knowledge can help tame emissions Pilot program tracks buildings’ energy use, informs occupants BY NELLY DESMARATTES Staff writer
The silence of domestic violence Non-profit founder warns students about abusive relationships BY DANA CETRONE Staff writer
One would never know just by looking at Valerie Nicholas that she was in abusive relationships for much of her life. Nicholas, the founder and co-president of Love is Not Enough, a nonprofit organization that mentors victims of abuse, spoke last night at the Stamp Student Union to a full room of roughly 30 students about how after years of feeling broken inside, she became empowered to change her life and show others how to do the same. “You have to feel good about yourself because if you don’t, you will only let the small things get bigger,” Nicholas said. “I’m here to empower people and
TOMORROW’S WEATHER:
say ‘Look at me.’” Nicholas described her experiences with domestic and sexual abuse and urged students to realize that obsessive love is not romantic and can be dangerous in relationships. “Free will and free being is the way it’s supposed to be,” Nicholas said. Because student activists feel the issue of domestic abuse is still taboo and not talked about enough, Sigma Psi Zeta sorority, the university’s Sexual Assault Response and Prevention Program and Terps for Choice — a group that advocates women’s reproductive rights — invited Nicholas to speak in honor of Domestic Violence Awareness Month.
see VIOLENCE, page 2 Rain/50s
Valerie Nicholas, the founder of Love is Not Enough, uses props to illustrate how students might stay in abusive relationships because they don’t realize the damage it does. VINCE SALAMONE/THE DIAMONDBACK
INDEX
NEWS . . . . . . . . . .2 OPINION . . . . . . . .4
FEATURES . . . . . .5 CLASSIFIED . . . . .8
A new university program fully launching this week seeks to give students and faculty more control over and information on their buildings’ energy use in hopes of reducing campus carbon emissions. The Energywi$e UM program hopes to decrease energy use in three campus buildings and 15 fraternity and sorority houses by providing building occupants with weekly energy consumption reports and suggestions on ways the occupants can conserve energy. The program, a collaboration between the Office of Sustainability and the Department of Facilities Management, monitors how the energy use in each building changes from week to week and includes incentives to motivate building occupants to slash their consumption. “Most people are not provided information about their energy use or provided specific strategies on how to reduce it,” Office of Sustainability Director Scott Lupin said. “Through this program, we are trying to change that.” The project consists of two separate parts. The first part, which began in September, is the Green Greek Challenge, where fraternities and sororities compete to have the lowest energy consumption. The challenge ends Nov. 21. The second part is the pilot launch of a larger program in the Chesapeake Building, Glenn Martin Hall and Van Munching Hall which ends Dec. 11. While developing incentives for the fraternities was relatively simple — they are being offered a catered, DJ-hosted pizza party at the end of the year — Campus Sustainability Coordinator Mark Stewart said choosing
DIVERSIONS . . . . .6 SPORTS . . . . . . . . .8
see ENERGY, page 3 www.diamondbackonline.com