Tuesday May 15, 2012 year: 132 No. 69
the student voice of
The Ohio State University
www.thelantern.com
thelantern
Presidential purse followed Obama to OSU
sports
Kristen Mitchell Senior Lantern reporter mitchell.935@osu.edu
Heading home
4A
Former Buckeye Mike Brewster was not chosen in the NFL Draft, but signed as a free agent with the Jaguars.
[ a+e ]
President Barack Obama has visited Ohio State twice this spring and has at least one receipt to prove it. While many students were away on Spring Break, the president spoke about energy to a crowd of about 2,600 at the RPAC on March 22. Obama returned to campus a few weeks later to kick off his 2012 presidential campaign, speaking to a crowd of about 14,000 at the Schottenstein Center on May 5. On April 25, Ann Habershaw, producer of Obama for America, signed an agreement to reserve the Schottenstein Center for $75,000 for May 5. This fee took care of all operations of the Schottenstein Center. While the overall cost of the event was not made public, and the university did not help fund it. “The Obama for America campaign is responsible for the costs associated with the president’s first campaign rally of 2012 because it was strictly a campaign-related event,” said Jessica Kershaw, press secretary for Obama for America-Ohio, in an email. Prior to Obama’s March 22 visit
Brittany Schock / Asst. photo editor
President Barack Obama spoke to a crowd of about 14,000 at the Schottenstein Center May 5. This was Obama’s 2nd visit to OSU this year. to the university, recreational sports director Don Stenta said he was notified of the visit the week before the event. “He came on the Thursday of spring break, we found out the Friday before,” Stenta said.
Since the RPAC event was not a part of his campaign, it was planned and funded by the White House. The RPAC space was provided free of charge as a courtesy for the speech, and the equipment used was brought in by the White House staff.
The event resulted in a day-long closure of the RPAC, but Stenta said he received no complaints for the inconvenience. For both events, the university had little time to prepare, a time crunch that Xen Riggs, associate vice president for Student Life, said was typical for these type of events. “Sometimes you get a week or a week-and-a-half notices, sometimes you get two days … they’re constantly making decisions on where they want to go and what messages they want to deliver, so they tend to happen on pretty short notice,” said Riggs, who oversees the Schottenstein Center and manages high profile campus events. When Obama came on May 5, Riggs said the university received a little more than a week’s notice that the president was interested in visiting OSU again. “I got a call on Thursday night that week before, and then they came into town the next day and we walked them around several facilities. We didn’t get the word they were definitely coming until late Friday night or early Saturday morning,” he said.
continued as Obama on 3A
OSU Boxing Club fights way back into ring Ron miles Senior Lantern reporter miles.139@osu.edu
1B
Darkness on the range
British rock band The Darkness has reunited and is performing its first Columbus show at Rock on the Range Sunday.
campus
Several punching bags rock back and forth after every jab, hook and uppercut. A rumble from every strike echoes through the walls of the RPAC. A looming presence in the midst of the madness, Luke Barrett makes his way around the room inspecting technique. As sweat pours down the faces of a group of boxers, muscles begin to tire, and Barrett erupts. Barrett pleads with the fighters to give him everything until the bell rings. *ding ding.* Barrett, a fourth-year in finance, is president of the Boxing Club at OSU. However, just six months ago, the gloves were unworn and the punching bags went untouched, unfamiliar with the beating to which they have since become accustomed. Barrett made it his mission to revive the failing club; he fought to restore life back to a club that appeared to be knocked out. “This winter I volunteered to pick it back up again,” Barrett said. “We started advertising in the winter, picked some guys up and started training in the spring.” Beginning the first week of April, the Boxing Club had about 20 members and that number has nearly doubled since. Caleb Jackson, a first-year in visual communication and vice president of the club, said he and Barrett set goals in training the new members. “We focused on their footwork, keeping their hands up, everything a good fighter needs to have,” Jackson said. “We wanted to get that set before we get going any further.” So far, the leaders of the club have seen improvement from its members.
continued as Boxing on 3A
Gas price apathy
2A
As the average price of gas declines nationally and locally, most OSU students said they are not being affected.
weather high 78 low 55 sunny
W 75/47 TH 71/51 F 79/58 SA 83/63
isolated t-storms mostly sunny mostly sunny mostly sunny www.weather.com
Brittany Schock / Asst. photo editor
Machi McGuire, a 2nd-year in mechanical engineering, punches the bag during Boxing Club practice in the RPAC on May 14.
Campus website outage cause still unknown Ally Marotti Copy chief marotti.5@osu.edu Some people’s weeks got off to a shaky start when they were unable to access several Ohio State websites, but the outage didn’t cause too much of a problem for others. Monday morning, several OSU websites were down and OSU officials still aren’t sure why. “Technical teams go through a really diligent process to look at all the pieces of the puzzle to determine what went wrong.” said Katharine Keune, communications director for the Office of the Chief Information Officer. The websites that were down Monday morning, including WOSU’s website, BuckeyeLink, wexarts. org, osumarion.osu.edu and cartoons.osu.edu, are all centrally hosted by the OCIO. Although the OCIO issued an outage report just before 9 a.m., some outages were reported as early as about 6 a.m. Keune said the affected sites were all up and running again by about 10 a.m., some sooner. BuckeyeLink was up again by 9:30 a.m., leaving just enough time to cause problems for some students whose scheduling windows opened Monday morning. “BuckeyeLink didn’t work for me. I was at the library at about 8:15 trying to schedule. I couldn’t get on to my student center,” said Kyle Mathews, a third-year in history. “I knew it was the website’s problem because I kept getting an internal error message.”
And just as the OCIO has yet to determine a cause, Mathews has yet to discover the ramifications of the outage. “I don’t know if the problem will affect my scheduling because I haven’t gotten back on yet,” Mathews said Monday afternoon. But there were other students the outage didn’t even touch. “I didn’t have a problem, I was a work at that time and didn’t need to access the system,” said Rebecca Shuman, a first-year grad student in educational policy and leadership. “I haven’t had any problems with it today.” Keune said the standard investigation to discover the cause would take a day or two, at least, and until then she didn’t want to speculate about what happened. “You don’t want to wonder what it is, you want to dig in and find out what it really is,” she said. The OCIO responded quickly, Keune said, and held a meeting at 9:30 a.m. Monday to discuss what went wrong. “We’re still working on the root cause,” Keune said. “Our primary concern was making sure everybody got up to full service.” Karen Simonian, director of media and public relations for the Wexner Center of the Arts, said the outage was “a hiccup.” “We always like to be accessible to potential visitors or any interested parties,” she said. “It would be a bigger deal if it were down for days.” Simonian said although the outage was inconvenient, it didn’t cause that many problems. “It was unfortunate, but we’re back up,” she said.
Courtesy of ocio.osu.edu
OCIO hosts multiple OSU websites that were affected by an outage Monday morning. Nick Houser, digital media director at WOSU, said its website was down from about 6 a.m. to about 9:50 a.m. During that time, web users weren’t
continued as Website on 3A 1A