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Courtside Preview: Tennessee vs. Vanderbilt
Emily DeLanzo brings the Hike of the Week
Friday, March 2, 2012
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Issue 37
E D I T O R I A L L Y
PUBLISHED SINCE 1906 http://utdailybeacon.com
Vol. 119
I N D E P E N D E N T
S T U D E N T
N E W S P A P E R
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T H E
U N I V E R S I T Y
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T E N N E S S E E
Hodges enters final phase of renovations Maximizing space, adding electrical outlets, buying furniture planned for summer Justin Joo Staff Writer The libraries administration and faculty of the John C. Hodges Library are preparing for renovations on the second floor Commons. The main goal of the renovations is to maximize the space available at the library. The wall dividing the South Commons and the Studio will be torn down. This will make the area more open and allow for more space to be used by students. The outer wall next to Starbucks will also be torn down to open up more space. According to Rita Smith, the executive associate dean of the libraries, there will also be an effort to put in more electrical outlets. “As we are able to do renovations,” Smith said, “we try to look at the electrical power situation and create more places to plug in, as we are able to do that within the budget of the project.” The renovations will also include additional furniture being purchased and the floor being refurbished. The Research Center will be combined with Circulation. There will also be $20,000-30,000 invested in new cameras and laptops for students to check out. The current renovations are the third phase of a plan that started in 2005. The most recent updates Hodges has gone through (the second phase) involved the creation of both the North and South Commons in 2007. The long time gap was due to the library administration gradually getting the full amount of
funding they needed year after year. “The third phase was already on paper with the idea of integrating the Studio and Media Services and opening things up,” Smith said. “We didn’t get the funding until (recently). You get a little bit of funding and you’re able to do it.” Now with all the resources they need, officials plan to begin the renovations in May, once the summer semester begins. The construction should be finished by early August. While there may be some inconvenience with the noise and portions of Hodges closed off, the Commons will remain open during the summer. Resources from the parts of the library under construction, such as the video cameras in the Studio, will be temporarily relocated so they can still be available for student use. The library administration is also planning additional renovations for the first floor. While still in the planning phase, potential first floor renovations could include relocating some of the reference material. Dean of Libraries Steven Smith said there are also plans to create a better environment for displaying some of the library’s special collections. “We want to create a better exhibit area,” Steven Smith said. “We have spectacular rare books and manuscripts in Special Collections, but no great place to exhibit them.” See LIBRARY on Page 3
Wade Rackley • The Daily Beacon
Old carpet from between the stacks waits to be moved during construction in summer 2010. More construction is to continue on the second floor in the Commons, Starbucks and the Studio this summer.
Special menus help food bank Wesley Mills Staff Writer One week out of the year for the second year in a row, Knoxville puts on its own restaurant week. Over 30 fine-dining establishments across the city offered specially priced menus as an add-on to their regular menus from Feb. 26 to March 2. The public is not the only one that benefits from the cheaper cuisine. Five dollars for every meal purchased go towards Second Harvest Food Bank, which will help feed the hungry throughout Knoxville and surrounding areas. This week is great for businesses like Ruth’s Chris Steak House, which last year almost doubled what it did three years ago during restaurant week. General manager Paul Hohe of Ruth’s Chris Steak House said that this year they are giving options to their guests to choose from the special restaurant week menu. Guests are able to choose from a New York strip steak, salmon, filet with shrimp and a stuffed chicken as an entrée with a choice of salad or soup, as well as a side dish and dessert. Hohe said they do not try to manipulate the menu or trick customers into not buying the cheaper foods. “What we do is we hand out our normal menus, and on top of that is the restaurant week menu,” Hohe said. “It’s very prominent; everyone will see the menu. In fact, Sunday night, the first night of restaurant week, over 90 percent of our guests who came in ordered off that menu.”
Season’s Café, like Ruth’s Chris Steak House, offered more than just a single selection on their menu. For the main dish, one could order Angus beef medallions served with mashed potatoes and asparagus or a beef tenderloin served with mashed potatoes with a rosemary demi-glace, brought out with a boneless chicken breast and asparagus. Appetizers such as mixed baby greens and a cheesecake dessert are also part of this threecourse meal. But it’s not all about the food. “There is a very challenging economy right now, a lot of people are in need, and we felt the need to help out,” Hohe said. “And since we are a restaurant and feed people we felt like it was a natural fit to work with Second Harvest, who also feeds people.” Season’s Café general manager Drake Little said that the atmosphere this week was much more lively and caring than other weeks. “It definitely boosts the morale of the people that came in,” Little said. “People know what they’re doing when they come in when they are ordering from the menu. They know exactly where it’s going. A lot more smiles on faces.” Little said he’s happy people come in and visit their restaurant, but he knows they are also coming in knowing they are helping out more than their stomachs. “You can just tell when they walk in the door that they are there for that specific reason,” Little said. “Obviously we’re a great restaurant and we love having them there. But it’s almost an extra incentive for them. Not only do they get a great meal, but they are getting the opportunity to help out.”
George Richardson • The Daily Beacon
Lizzy Sovine, sophomore in physics and astronomy, reads outside HSS on Tuesday. The warm weather will end with storms this weekend and colder weather coming in next week.
Rutgers suicide case gains national relevance The Associated Press NEW BRUNSWICK, N.J. — The man prosecutors say was secretly watched via webcam while kissing a Rutgers University freshman in a dorm room could testify as early as Thursday in the privacy-invasion trial of the student's roommate. The man, who has been identified only by as M.B., has been mentioned often in the first three days of testimony in the trial of Dharun Ravi, 20. Ravi’s roommate, Tyler Clementi, committed suicide in September 2010, days after prosecutors say Ravi briefly watched streaming footage of the encounter with M.B. Ravi was a member of the school’s Ultimate Frisbee club, and the former team captain testified Thursday that the defendant told him about trying to use a webcam to “capture images of his roommate.” He said Ravi seemed uncomfortable with the idea of his roommate being gay. Little is known about M.B. from court filings, but witnesses have described him as a “sketchy” man around 30 years old. One student witness got a laugh from the jury when she described him as “not obscenely old;” another said his age — not that he was a man — made his liaison with their dormmate “scandalous.” His identity has been kept secret, and it remained unclear Thursday morning how tightly M.B.’s identity would be shielded during his testimony. Parry Aftab, a lawyer and online privacy expert, said that prosecutors are trying to keep his name and image from being made public because he’s the alleged victim of invasion of privacy, which is considered a sex crime. She said it’s a point of law that’s untested in New Jersey. “It may or may not be a sex crime,” she said. “The real question is: is that sexual conduct, sexual activity, which triggers the law?” No one has testified that
they saw genitalia or sexual acts — only kissing by men who had their pants on. When the man takes the stand, it could mark the highest-profile testimony in the case, which has drawn national attention as an example of the societal challenges facing young gays and lesbians. Ravi is not charged in the death of Clementi, who jumped off the George Washington Bridge into the Hudson River days after the encounter. Charges against Ravi include a hate crime, invasion of privacy and several counts that accuse him of trying to cover his tracks. In earlier testimony, former Rutgers student Molly Wei said Ravi showed her a live web stream of Clementi, 18, kissing a man in the dorm room the young men shared. Wei said she invited Ravi, whom she had known since middle school, to her dorm room for a snack a few minutes after 9 p.m. on Sept. 19, 2010. When Ravi tried to go back, she said, Clementi told him that he wanted the cramped dorm room to himself for a few hours. So Ravi returned. Within a few minutes, she said, he used her computer to view live images from his webcam. It was then, she said, that she saw about two seconds of Clementi and an older man kissing. She said she agreed to turn the webcam back on at the request of a woman who was among a group dropped by her room. “It was the exact same image, except that they had taken their tops off,” she said. “As soon as they saw it, I turned it off.” She said she called Rutgers police a few days later after learning about a Twitter message Ravi posted on Sept. 21, when Clementi requested privacy in the room again. “Anyone with iChat,” he posted, “I dare you to videochat me between the hours of 9:30 and 12. Yes, it’s happening again.”