thelantern
Tuesday February 4, 2014
the student voice of The Ohio State University
year: 134 No. 17
www.thelantern.com @TheLantern weather high 33 low 30 wintry mix
Hockey at the halfway mark
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Remembering cinema’s PSH
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North Campus demolition
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USG election could be ‘anyone’s race to win’ OSU ‘making history’ 6 presidential and vice presidential campaigns slated to be on the USG ballot this year
LIZ YOUNG Campus editor young.1693@osu.edu Undergraduate Student Government’s campaign season this year is set to be a flurry of chalk, T-shirts and tweets. An election season after the first unopposed USG campaign in nearly 50 years, the OSU student body will have to choose between the largest cluster of competitors since 2003. There are set to be six presidential and vice presidential campaigns on the ballot this spring. In 2003, six campaigns also ran, but one — Mike Goodman and Frank Sasso — swept 31.6 percent of the vote, according to the USG Alumni Society website. This year’s ballot is slated to list: • Andrew Warnecke, running with Logan Recker • Celia Wright, running with Leah Lacure • Current USG Vice President Josh Ahart, running with Jen Tripi • Mohamad Mohamad, running with Sean Crowe • Ryan Hedrick, running with Nicole Spaetzel • Vytas Aukstuolis, running with Nicholas Macek There are also set to be 104 senatorial candidates running for about 40 spots in the general assembly, said Chief Justice of the Judiciary Panel Tyler Byrum, a fourth-year in engineering physics. Byrum said his role in the election process is remaining impartial, making sure USG bylaws are being followed and “just generally running the election.” Campaigning is set to begin Feb. 19 and run until voting is held between March 3 and 5, Byrum said in an email, and a presidential debate is slated for Feb. 25 at the Ohio Union. Current USG President Taylor Stepp, a fourthyear in public affairs, was the only presidential candidate on the ballot last spring, the first time a candidate had run unopposed since 1966. He
Andrew Warnecke with Logan Recker
Celia Wright
with Leah Lacure
Josh Ahart with Jen Tripi
Mohamad Mohamad with Sean Crowe
Ryan Hedrick
with Nicole Spaetzel
Vytas Aukstuolis with Nicholas Macek
was also the first two-term USG president in about 10 years, since Eddie Pauline’s 2001 and 2002 successes. If Stepp’s vice president, Ahart, a fourth-year in public affairs, were to win this year’s election, he would be the first elected vice president to move up the next year since 2007. That was the year Kate Christobek, who served as vice president while Ryan Fournier was president in 2006, won the presidency. Ahart, who has been involved with USG since he was a freshman, said he’s enthusiastic about the possibility of moving into the presidency. “I don’t really think about when’s the last time that happened or historically this or that, but I’m really excited about the election, and if we win,
OPINION
Super Bowl halftime show underwhelms
Courtesy of MCT
The Red Hot Chili Peppers perform at the halftime show of Super Bowl XLVIII with Bruno Mars Feb. 2.
JACOB HOLLAR Lantern reporter hollar.38@osu.edu It must be a performer’s dream: a big-budget lights and pyrotechnics display, a full-capacity crowd and millions more watching live on television. That’s what you get when you’re the entertainment for a Super Bowl halftime show. Bruno Mars, whose birth name is Peter Gene Hernandez, and Red Hot Chili Peppers — both pretty big names in the modern music industry — took the stage Sunday to live the dream. But for all that, what the NFL repeatedly billed as the “biggest concert of the year” left me a little underwhelmed. That’s not to say the artists didn’t perform well. Bruno Mars (or was that Janelle Monáe?) is certainly a qualified entertainer, and the appearance of the Red Hot Chili Peppers was a welcome addition. But the whole thing was just … meh. In any other concert circumstances, I’d have no complaints. But this particular concert was the halftime show for the Super Bowl XLVIII. The expectation is that I’m going to be blown away. It should have been, well, super.
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MADISON CURTIS / Design editor
source:reporting
for what we can do next year,” he said. Ahart also said with six campaign teams, there is an opportunity for greater OSU student engagement. “Last year we had a lot of unity around Taylor and I as candidates together … I think the organization was more unified around us,” he said. “This year it’s not a bad thing (to have more candidates because) if you think about it we can get out to as many students as possible from every area of the university … which will inevitably increase voter turnout.” In 2012, when Stepp was elected to his first term, voter turnout was the highest since 1975
with 1st black president KRISTEN MITCHELL Editor-in-chief mitchell.935@osu.edu
For the first time in the university’s 144-year history, Ohio State has appointed a black president. The historic move is one many people say could open doors for minorities at OSU in the future. Dr. Michael Drake, current chancellor at the University of California Irvine, was introduced as the next university president Thursday. “Ohio State is bold in its intentions to inspire greatness in its faculty, its staff and its students as it ascends further in the ranks of the world’s remnant institutions of higher education,” Drake said in his first speech after the announcement was made at a Board of Trustees. “Transforming lives is a tall order but this university is sharpening its focus in ways that will improve lives close to home and around the world. “I am deeply humbled by this opportunity and am looking forward very much to joining the Buckeye family,” he said. OSU’s 15th president isn’t set to begin his term until June 30, but some are already excited about what the ground-breaking announcement could mean for the university. “I’m very excited, I’m very excited for the opportunity it forwards to all communities,” said Larry Williamson, director of the Frank W. Hale Jr. Black Cultural Center. For a university with the size and influence of OSU, Williamson said the choice demonstrates social progress. “It shows the growth. We now have an African-American president of the United States, that’s opened a lot of doors for people of color,” he said. “It shows leaps and bounds, it opens up other opportunities for other people of ethnicities to become presidents of the university.” Black representation According to university diversity data on 2,840 regular faculty, only about 3.9 percent were black as of September 2013. The only category in which blacks have a greater representation than whites among staff reported is service and maintenance staff, according to the university diversity summary for faculty and staff. Sable Wallace, a third-year in finance and president of the Black Student Association, said she didn’t know anything about Drake before the announcement, however, after getting more information on him, said he’s fit for the job. She said having a black university president could have an impact on campus race relations.
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OSU 5th in B1G faculty salaries, some professors unfazed LOGAN HICKMAN Senior Lantern reporter hickman.201@osu.edu Ohio State landed behind a few other conference schools for average faculty salaries during 2012-13, according to a report from the American Association of University Professors. The report, which computes the average salaries of full-time university faculty in a given institution, showed OSU ranked fifth among the 12 Big Ten universities. According to the report, OSU’s average weighted faculty salary was just more than $110,000, slightly above the Big Ten median salary of almost $107,000. A median can be defined as the middle number in a data set and is often different from an average. Northwestern University, the only private institution in the Big Ten, was first in the conference with an average of nearly $142,000, followed by the University of Michigan, Penn State and University of Illinois. The University of Nebraska had the lowest average faculty salary, at about $95,000. There are roughly 2,800 regular faculty members at OSU, according to diversity data from September 2013, compared to about 3,300 full-time faculty at Northwestern, according to its facts website, and about 1,600 general faculty at Nebraska, according to its 2013-14 fact book. Instead of comparing faculty-wide salaries, OSU philosophy professor Allan Silverman said more accurate salary comparisons could probably be made between departments of various universities. “Do not be misled by the university-wide numbers. If we have more medical faculty than, say, Purdue, that will skew the compensation figures. A more apt comparison would be to look at, say, the Purdue engineering salaries against the OSU engineering salaries, or Wisconsin history vs. OSU history,” he said in an email. The Faculty Compensation and Benefits Committee of University Senate helps monitor the state of OSU faculty pay, in part by releasing an annual report to the OSU community outlining its ongoing examination of faculty compensation, retirement benefits, various insurances and other conditions, according to its 2013 Salary and Benefits Report. This report also includes recommendations for compensation, “based primarily on comparisons of OSU faculty salary data with salary data of established groups of peer institutions, contained in data from the AAUP Faculty Compensation Survey,” according to the report. OSU spokesman Gary Lewis said OSU faculty salaries are based on a few things, the first being external factors, including areas of specialization and expertise. “This means that Ohio State tries to be
Faculty salaries, OSU vs. B1G •
At OSU, salaries are based on external factors, such as areas of specialization and expertise, and internal factors, such as quality of work.
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Student evaluations of instruction play a role in determining raises.
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Median Salary $106, 821
Nebraska $95,154
source: reporting
competitive with what other similar institutions are paying faculty members in similar fields,” Lewis said in an email. “Medical schools, for example, share information with each other about their average salaries, and Ohio State keeps that information in mind when recruiting faculty here. It also looks at similar information for different levels of experience.” The second consideration for determining faculty salaries is internal factors, such as the quality of the work the faculty member does, Lewis said. Quality of work “includes teaching, designing courses, carrying out research and writing articles and books, giving talks and presentations to other scholarly groups across the country and world, serving on committees, and providing outreach to the community and to his or her scholarly discipline, among others,” Lewis said. Finally, Lewis said student evaluations of instruction, more commonly called SEIs, play a role in determining faculty raises. “SEI reports do play a role, as do other student evaluations, since they are typically part of the information that faculty members turn in as part of
Wisconsin $102,759
Ohio State $110,348
Michigan $121,278
Northwestern $141,976
MADISON CURTIS / Design editor their annual review materials, which are then used in the annual salary process,” Lewis said. OSU associate professor of philosophy Timothy Schroeder said, for him, it was more about the people at a school. “When I was recruited here, the first thing that made me want to come was the colleagues I would have. The philosophy department here includes some internationally famous people doing great work, and the level of research activity and excitement is wonderful. I’ve learned a lot by coming here,” he said. He added that money isn’t the most important factor in deciding where to work. “For me, the strongest recruitment pull is usually going to be the chance to work with, and learn from, other philosophers who are really great at what they do. And so, as you can see, I don’t think it’s easy to find a better philosophy department in the Big Ten than Ohio State. Even if I’d had a choice, I wouldn’t now be at Northwestern or Penn State or Purdue,” Schroeder said. Schroeder said next to the Chicago area,
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