7-2-15

The Oracle THURSDAY, JULY 2, 2015 I VOL. 52 NO. 131

Inside this Issue

A S S T .

“Jurassic World” brings fans back to dinosaurs in the box office. Page 4

Montage

S PORTS Antigua fills void with Penn State transfer. BACK

N E W S

E D I T O R

Just several hours southeast of Florida, there is currently a social storm brewing on the island of Hispaniola, one that is beginning to be recognized as a humanitarian crisis.

To bring attention to the issue, a panel consisting of USF students, alumni and faculty will hold a forum to discuss the current exodus of Haitians from the Dominican Republic in room 3707 of the Marshall Student Center today at 7 p.m.

As a result of legislation known as the Naturalization Law in the Dominican Republic, earthquake survivors and Dominican-born Haitians face forced deportation.

Haiti itself has taken the backlash of the exodus with over 12,000 Haitians — who

voluntarily left in fear of potential violence — forced onto the other side of Hispaniola, according to the Washington Post. The Haitian government and the Human Rights Watch have called the deportations a humanitarian crisis.

“We have protests going on, we have all of this going on, but nobody actually sat down and talked about the situation and basically get a better understanding,” Stephania Romulus said.

Romulus is the president of Fanm Kreyol Inc., one of the four student organizations sponsoring the event. The other three include Neg Kreyol Inc., Club Creole and the Latin American Student Association.

The forum is expected to feature members of the Haitian community as speakers, such as USF Africana studies professor Linda TavernierAlmada, who protested racism

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UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH FLORIDA

Haitian students to lead discussion on Caribbean migration crisis

By Christopher Collier

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in the U.S. and discrimination against Haitians.

Also expected to speak at the forum is Jean-Rene Rinvil, founder of iVision TV and director of “Culture Clash” a documentary on second-generation Caribbean Americans and the challenges they face that most other Americans do not.

“We understand that sometimes we have to go out, we have to leave the country, but the way that they try to make us leave the country is what we’re hurt about,” Romulus said.

The forum will have a panel format in which the host, USF alumnus Ralphe Jean Poix, will direct questions to the panel and to the audience. The panel will consist of TavernierAlmada, current USF student Stephen Jones, and USF alum-

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Dunk the dean

Dean Eric Eisenberg was dunked outside Juniper-Poplar at Wednesdsay’s Celebrity Dunk Tank hosted by the College of Arts and Sciences, New Student Connections and the Dean’s Student Leadership Society. ORACLE PHOTO / CHRISTOPHER COLLIER

Schools share strategies for student success

By Russell Nay A S S T .

N E W S

E D I T O R

As universities located in Florida’s three largest metropolitan areas, USF, UCF and FIU are a driving force in the state’s higher education.

Combined, the three universities account for nearly half of all baccalaureate degrees in Florida.

In this year’s Florida Board of Governors (BOG) performancebased funding ranking system, which determines how much money state universities receive based on their performance, USF placed second and UCF and FIU tied for third – totaling more than $65 million between the three.

The three universities came together last year to form the Florida Consortium of Metropolitan Research Universities and outlined the four impacts they hoped their union would accomplish — fueling Florida’s economy, increasing the number of graduates in high-demand job fields, focusing on the success of underrepresented and limited-income students in college and in careers and emphasizing career readiness for all graduates.

In order to accomplish the consortium’s goals, each university is working to implement strategies that focus on closely monitoring students’ progress toward accomplishing their degrees and ensuring students graduate with the skills they need to find employment in their respective fields.

While the specific methods may differ from school to school, each fall under the

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consortium’s general strategies, and consortium Executive Director Michael Preston said each university will work to share successful practices.

Concerning keeping students on track toward a degree, USF Vice Provost Paul Dosal said USF is currently refining a software tool called Inspire for Advisers which he expects will be in use by the upcoming fall semester.

The software will allow academic advisers to identify students who are at risk of not completing their degrees.

Students would be evaluated on their overall performance in their classes, including if they are actively attending classes, if they are completing assignments and even if they are participating in class.

He said once identified, students who are deemed at risk would be asked by an adviser to come in for an advising session where they could discuss the student’s academic performance and attempt to revise the student’s academic plans to meet his or her needs for a degree.

“Our goal here is to facilitate the creation of these paths and help (students) get there as

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soon as possible,” Dosal said.

“We’re not trying to mandate what students do but … pull from a better understanding of what they want to do and what their interests are and then chart a path that helps them get to that destination.”

Russ Coughenour, assistant vice president for Career Services at USF, said as a part of the consortium’s focus on career readiness for students, the university is also working to strengthen its internship programs with community business partners and make internship opportunities more easily accessible for students.

Coughenour said Career Services has proposed to hold a virtual career fair for internships in November, which would allow students from USF, UCF and FIU to log into a website and view internships within the universities’ three metropolitan areas.

“That is probably the best example of where we, alongside UCF and FIU, are working collaboratively to expand both the number and the variety of internships available to students at the three universities,” he said. “A student can, from the privacy of their apartment or residence hall … search for internships, interact with recruiters via chat room and even be invited into a pri-

vate chatroom where they can be Skype interviewed for the internship.”

Coughenour also said USF’s Career Services started an employer relations function this spring which uses USF’s large employer database to reach out to employers without

“Our goal here is to facilitate the creation of these paths and help (students) get there as soon as possible.”

Paul Dosal USF Vice Provost

internship programs and help them start one.

“I would say 35 to 40 percent of companies in that database don’t even have an internship program right now,” he said. “A lot of companies want to (start an internship) — they just don’t know how to get it done.”

At FIU, Dean of Undergraduate Education Douglas Robertson said while its academic advising enhancement plan has been in the making for four years, the university is continuing to develop it under the consortium.

He said FIU currently has

an office that does nothing but attempt to identify academic barriers for students, both overall and in individual cases.

“We would like to, with our partners, create a data warehouse that can handle big datasets,” Robertson said. “We can share these practices, but we can also do similar analyses across the three institutions.”

To help students become career ready earlier in college, he said FIU is also planning to integrate a career development program with its academic advising program, as well as notify students about internships they could apply for.

Robertson said FIU is also using a $500,000 Helmsley Charitable Trust grant to research lower division STEM gateway courses for the consortium, as these courses are one of the biggest barriers to academic progress.

In Orlando, Preston said UCF, like USF, will enhance its academic advising efforts by quickly responding to when students appear to fall off track.

He said advisers will receive alerts to when students make academic decisions which could jeopardize their degrees, like unexpectedly making low grades or choosing courses which are inherently difficult to take together.

Preston also said UCF will

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focus on helping students finish their bachelor’s degrees in four years instead of paying additional expenses and spending unnecessary time out of the workforce.

By 2018, the consortium specifically hopes to increase the number of bachelor’s degrees in the state by 12 percent or 3,660 degrees, increase the sixyear first-time-in-college graduation rate for minority students by four percentage points to a total of 67 percent, increase the number of graduates employed or continuing education in Florida by three percentage points to a total of 79 percent and increase graduates’ salaries by 10 percent for an average of $39,072.

To date, the consortium has received $8.5 million in funding from the BOG, $500,000 for five years from the Helios Education Foundation and an annual $75,000 from each university in the partnership.

While the consortium’s latest funding request for $12 million did not make the finalized state budget, Dosal said the consortium will continue its attempt to receive additional funding from philanthropic community members like the Helios Education Foundation and work toward its 2018 goal completion date.

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ni Stachyse Stanis and Bethsy Plaisir.

The crisis began in 2010 when a 7.0 magnitude earthquake ravaged Haiti, taking the lives of 220,000 and injuring 300,000 people. In the fallout of that disaster, the Dominican Republic offered to help its western neighbor by opening the border to displaced Haitians.

That goodwill has apparently been used up as roughly 524,000 migrant workers, 90 percent of whom are Haitian, had until Wednesday to acquire the papers to stay in the Dominican Republic according to the New York Times.

The deportations aren’t limited to undocumented laborers. Native-born Dominicans with Haitian descent have been targeted also.

“We have a lot of these people that’ve been living there for a long time that’ve never been to Haiti that were affected by this,” said accounting

major Reginald Mompoint, president of Neg Kreyol Inc. Mompoint said the earthquake took everything from hundreds of thousands of Haitians, causing them to leave Haiti for the Dominican Republic.

“They lost their homes during the earthquake so they’re trying to have a job in the Dominican Republic so they went there,” Mompoint said.

“Also you have the Haitians who have been living there for generations to generations.

So that kind of piled up and then you have all these people that’ve been working the sugar canes and then they lost their citizenship due to this law and then they had to be deported back to Haiti.”

Mompoint at this point it’s unclear how the Haitian government will handle the massive influx of repatriated Haitians from the Dominican Republic.

“I think the two governments have to come together,” Mompoint said. “Then they have to find a common ground forum for why this issue is happening.”

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‘Jurassic World’ brings dino excitement back to life

By Christopher Collier C O M M E N T A R Y

In 1993 Steven Spielberg unleashed “Jurassic Park,” the Hollywood masterpiece that changed public perception of dinosaurs and inspired a generation of children to become paleontologists in adulthood.

By the time “Jurassic Park III” released in 2001, steam behind the franchise waned and it seemed that Isla Nublar and its ferocious inhabitants would be forever locked in the vaults of film history.

Dinosaurs, it would seem, just weren’t cool enough to hold the attention of the public.

Enter “Jurassic World,” an adventure back to Isla Nublar, set 22 years after the first Jurassic Park. Since its opening weekend, the film has grossed more than $514 million according to IMDb. The adventure begins in a lab with two hatching eggs. An eerie reptilian eye

glares from one at the camera, while a scaly arm bursts through and scratches at the sides. We are given a moment to reflect before the scene abruptly jumps to a field of snow. The film often relies on jump-cuts to establish tension and energy which works in some instances but distracts in others.

From this scene we are introduced to the film’s two younger protagonists – Gray and Zach Mitchell. The teenager Zach (Nick Robinson) is moody and aloof while his younger brother Gray (Ty Simpkins) is a walking encyclopedia on the park and of dinosaurs. They’re reminiscent of the two youngsters of the original film and both actors get the job done. The film only asks us to care about them when their lives are in jeopardy.

Many characters in the script could’ve been axed – the boy’s parents are forgettable. Some others seem to either be redshirts or to serve

the purpose of moving the plot along and then disappear for the rest of the film.

The park has undergone radical transformations with an emphasis on safety and control. Using John Hammond’s motto of “spare no expense” the new owner of Jurassic Park – now Jurassic World – Simon Masrani (Irrfan Khan) serves to reassure the characters and audience that the park is indeed safe. Masrani’s unfortunate demise brings us back to the world of reality where no one is safe from the animals in the park.

Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard play the film’s two main protagonists – Owen Grady and Claire Dearing.

Owen is a former Navy officer that trains velociraptors.

Claire runs the logistical operations of the park while driving a Mercedes in several scenes.

The movie’s antagonist, a genetically-modified dinosaur dubbed the Indominus

Rex by its creators, has been created to lure tourists back to the island. For reasons not made entirely clear, the park isn’t doing as well as it could be and the Indominus is the ticket to getting people back in. People, it seemed, just didn’t think dinosaurs were cool anymore.

The Indominus we discover was not only raised in captivity, but in solitude. The Indominus killed her sister, the other egg from the beginning of the film. Owen comments on the mental state of such a creature saying that even his velociraptors were raised with others of its kind.

The story takes some time to get going but once the Indominus inevitably escapes, the pace doesn’t let up. The climax makes for some riveting fun and though it isn’t always plausible, the story resurrects old ideas presented by the original while injecting new life into the franchise.

Rating: 4/5

Upcoming releases “Minions” July 10

“Ant-Man” July 17

“Fantastic Four” Aug. 7

In its opening weekend, “Jurassic World” earned a record-setting more than $500 million in the box office worldwide.

PHOTOS SPECIAL TO THE ORACLE

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coach after former coach Chris Foster resigned in early June.

USF finds new radio partner

with former kicker Marvin Kloss named a finalist for the 2013 Lou Groza award and punter Mattias Ciabatti named as a First-Team All-Conference player last season.

Appalachian State has an opening for a running backs

There will be a new radio home for USF’s athletics this year, as WWBA 820 AM reached a multi-year agreement with the school Wednesday.

The News Talk Florida station will broadcast all of USF’s football and men’s basketball

games and most women’s basketball games.

USF was in need of a new radio partner after 98.7 The Fan changed its format due to new ownership in early December.

The school will bring back the same team of broadcasters and analysts as it used last season, led by “Voice of the Bulls” Jim Louk.

Opinion

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SCOTUS ruling not a personal attack against conservatives COLU M N I ST

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The Oracle is published Monday through Thursday during the fall and spring semesters, and twice weekly, Monday and Thursday, during the summer.

The Oracle allocates one free issue to each student.

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After the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on the Affordable Care Act and same-sex marriage last week, many conservatives are now putting in their two cents.

The court ruled in King v.

Burwell that those receiving health insurance in a state without an exchange can use those set in place by the federal government, a ruling some Republicans have deemed “tyrannical.” Just a day later, the court ruled in Obergefell v. Hodges that the Constitution guarantees same-sex couples a right to marry.

To put it simply, it wasn’t a good week for the right wing.

While both cases have spurred conservative backlash, the ruling permitting same-sex marriage nationwide received tremendous complaints about the end of religious freedom as we know it under a too-powerful court, leading some to want to change the way the court works.

Though the reaction was completely expected, many of the responses seem more like temper tantrums than constructive concerns. More important, such extreme dissent all because the right didn’t get its way — which went as far as Republican presidential candidate and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz to call the ruling the “darkest 24 hours in our nation’s history” — undermines the necessity of the court during a time when the country needed to be more progressive in terms of marriage equality.

Take, for instance, GOP presidential candidate Mike Huckabee, who, as reported in the Washington Times, said the ruling “redefined how the U.S. government works” and that “unelected lawyers” ignored the will of citizens.

Or, as mentioned in Rolling Stone, David French of the National Review claimed the ruling is proof there really isn’t a true right to free speech or religious freedom, arguing what is now law invalidates individuals’ Christian convictions.

Overly dramatic worries aside,

the ruling had to happen. The right to marry in the U.S. was making slow progress because of the narrow, conservative ideologies holding the basic right behind. Those ideologies were favored for too long.

Because the Supreme Court didn’t swing his way, Sen. Ted Cruz made a plan to introduce a constitutional amendment that would require the Supreme Court justices to face re-election, as reported in Vice.

At the end of the day, conservatives’ disappointment isn’t just about the rulings. If the court doesn’t rule in their favor, the court then needs to be reformed. Yet, it’s not as though the court never made conservative rulings.

Under the conservative Chief Justice Roberts, the Supreme Court struck down a section of the Voting Rights Act in Shelby Counter v. Holder that required states and localities with a past of racial discrimination to run election law changes past the Justice Department.

In two separate cases, the court made it harder for employees to file suit based on claims of discrimination. The Constitutional Accountability Center also found in a study that business interests have been defended more so in Roberts’ court than in previous eras, as reported by MSNBC. While these instances may not be in our national memory the way last week’s rulings are, it’s unjust for Republicans to claim they’ve been singled out when they don’t get what they want. Instead of being in complete denial — as the conservative Frontpage Mag mentioned the comforting fact that rulings can be overturned — it’s time to realize that social change is not a personal attack, but simply progress.

Isabelle Cavazos is a senior majoring in English and Spanish.

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What you said In light of a recent Inside Higher Education article discussing the potential effects of the U.S. Supreme Court’s legalization of same-sex marriage on policies at religious universities, editor Isabelle Cavazos asked students if they think these schools should have to accept applicants or hire faculty in same-sex marriages.

“If it’s private, they can have anyone they want.”

— Anthony Hunter, a senior majoring in finance

“I don’t think they should be able to deny them because of their preference, but the school should get to regulate clubs and organizations.” ­— Miles Burman, a graduate students studying accounting “I don’t see why they should have to discriminate on anyone based on that.”

— David Monteith, a senior majoring in accounting

“It depends if their policy agrees with every rule in their religion. If it doesn’t, they should at least consider it.”

— Daniela Romero, a sophomore majoring in geology and physics

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Men’s Basketball

Antigua fills void with Penn State transfer

By Vinnie Portell S P O R T S

E D I T O R

The USF men’s basketball team entered the summer with its depth at guard a strength, as over half the roster had some experience at the position.

But coach Orlando Antigua and the Bulls recently found themselves without two guards who were expected to see significant playing time.

Antigua made sure the Bulls wouldn’t be without help for too long as he signed Penn State transfer player Geno Thorpe to a financial aid agreement early Wednesday.

Thorpe won’t be able to add depth right away, as he can’t play in games until the 2016-17 season due to NCAA transfer rules.

Rising sophomore Troy Holston Jr. will likely be back on the court by the time Thorpe is eligible, as recov-

eries from ACL tears generally take anywhere from six to nine months.

But Thorpe will fill the void made by Lee Junior College player Shawn Smith when he chose to not enroll at USF after verbally committing when he visited the campus in March.

The 6-foot-3, 180-pound guard was ranked as a threestar recruit coming out of high school and played in all 34 games for the Nittany Lions last season as a sophomore, starting 17 and averaging 8.7 points per game.

At 83.9 percent, Thorpe was the Nittany Lions’ best freethrow shooter last season.

In his only season playing Division I basketball, Smith averaged 5.7 points and 3.2 rebounds per game for Texas A&M in the 2013-14 season.

But even with the addition of Thorpe, Antigua still lacks depth at the guard position for the upcoming season.

Coach Orlando Antigua signed Penn State guard Geno Thorpe on Wednesday, but the rising junior won’t be able to help the Bulls’ lack of depth at the position until he is eligible to play next season.

ORACLE FILE PHOTO/ADAM MATHIEU

Antigua still has one scholarship available, but he would have to find a way to add a junior college player or one with an exception to the

NCAA’s transfer rule — something difficult to accomplish this late in the offseason.

With leading scorer Corey Allen Jr. gone, Antigua and the

Bulls will likely have to rely on Maryland-transfer Roddy Peters and freshman guard Jahmal McMurray more than anticipated.

Notebook

Woulard announces transfer to USF

Former UCLA quarterback Asiantii Woulard announced his decision to transfer to USF on Monday after meeting with coach Willie Taggart last week. ORACLE FILE PHOTO/ADAM MATHIEU

By Vinnie Portell S P O R T S

E D I T O R

Coach Willie Taggart’s latest project at the quarterback position – former UCLA quarterback Asiantii Woulard - is set to arrive on campus some time this month after announcing Monday on Twitter he will transfer to USF. Woulard was a four-star recruit in the 2013 class out of Winter Park and ranked as the best dual-threat quarterback in the nation.

He committed twice to the Bulls before ultimately de-committing when former coach Skip Holtz was relieved of his position.

In the time since, the highly recruited Woulard sat on the

sidelines at UCLA for two years without playing a down.

After failing to become the backup quarterback last season, Woulard announced his decision to transfer in early June after the Bruins added freshman Josh Rosen, the top quarterback recruit in the class of 2015.

“I am very familiar with the team already, it’s close to home and it’s a great situation to come in and compete,” Woulard said in an interview with ESPN. “USF is a program that has been waiting for something special and I want to help build that.”

The 6-foot-3, 210-pound quarterback will likely have to sit out the 2015-16 season due to NCAA transfer rules.

In the meantime, Taggart will turn the Bulls’ offense over to either sophomore Quinton Flowers or senior Steven Bench.

Report: Special teams coach leaves

With a little more than a month remaining before training camp opens Aug. 6, Sports Illustrated reported Tuesday that special teams and tight ends coach Stu Holt is leaving USF for a position with Appalachian State.

Holt oversaw arguably USF’s best unit over the past two seasons. The Bulls’ special teams unit helped make up for other units’ lackluster production,

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