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NEWS 2/3/15 2:04pm

Blanket tax crack team finalizes proposal for ballot

By Jieya Wen

Jieya WenThresher StaffThe Blanket Tax Crack Team is currently collecting student signatures for a petition to bring the “pot of gold” blanket tax proposal to a vote, according to Nick Cornell, chair of the BTCT. The petition requires the signatures of 200 students, or 5 percent of the student body, to be included on the General Election ballot. The proposal requires a 20 percent referendum and two-thirds in favor to pass.Under the proposal, current blanket tax organizations would become subsidiary organizations. The estimated total blanket tax fee will be $85 per student, not including a $20 intramural fee. Subsidiary organizations would have their budgets approved by the standing committee and would not be allocated less than 75 percent of its budget from the previous year. Organizations could apply for further funds from the “pot of gold,” which would consist of unallocated funds. If funds are not used in their entirety, surplus above 125 percent would be returned to the pot of gold. “The biggest risk is we don’t have enough turnout at all,” Cornell, Sid Richardson College president, said. “The Crack Team will be visiting college government meetings to talk to students who want to know more or have questions about the system.”The BTCT presented details of the proposal at the SA meeting on Jan. 28, including the timeline of the blanket tax process, the composition of the blanket tax standing committee and ways to handle blanket tax surplus. “The standing committee is chaired by the SA treasurer, [who is a voting member,]” Cornell said. “The voting members [also include] two student members that are officers, treasurers or presidents of blanket tax organizations, two students in at large positions who are not officers of blanket tax organizations, a college president or senator and one staff advisor to a blanket tax organization. Two members of the committee are non-voting: a SA parliamentarian and the SA advisor, who advises on the process.”The standing committee would review subsidiary organizations’ budgets in April. Initiative funding applications will be available in late September for fall semesters and late February for spring semesters. On Jan. 21 and 22, the Crack Team held sessions to answer questions and gather feedback on the proposal. Cornell said students were interested in how new organizations could become a subsidiary organization under the new system. Under the current blanket tax system, organizations must petition through the General Election in order to gain more funding.“An organization can become a subsidiary organization without necessitating a funding increase,” Cornell, a senior, said. “Simultaneously, a funding increase can happen without adding any new organization or tying that funding increase to a specific organization. So, now the blanket tax funding serves student interests.”The Crack Team addressed how current blanket tax organizations would apply for more funding. Cornell said the standing committee can sign off on organizations’ requests for more money.“In the case that it’s a significant increase, they would meet with the standing committee to discuss [the budget],” Cornell said. “The committee’s job is to evaluate the proposed increase and how well it serves its missions and the mission of blanket tax, in line with Rice’s spending policies as well. So it’s not a competitive process.”Cornell said subsidiary organizations have priority on funds, and any other student organizations requiring funding for events can apply for funds from the remaining initiative fund. Julie Neisler, advisor of Rice Program Council, said RPC is excited about the new blanket tax proposal and is confident that RPC’s budget will receive full funding under the new blanket tax model. Neisler said RPC does not get enough funding under the current blanket tax process and that it is hard to convince students to vote for an increase in their blanket tax.According to Neisler, RPC requires extra funding beyond blanket tax in order to provide sufficient programming, but the proposed model will make funding requests easier for subsidiary organizations. “With the opportunity for additional funding, RPC would be able to bring back some programs that were cut, create new programs and not need to depend on Student Activities President’s Programming funding for late-night substance-free programming,” Neisler said.

NEWS 2/3/15 2:02pm

LGBTQA advocacy finds home in Queer Resource Center

By Isabella Bender Zevallos

After a kick-off party and first official meeting, the Queer Resource Center has been newly inaugurated at Rice University. The launching event was held on Jan. 29 and attendees included LGBTQA+ community members and allies from the undergraduate and graduate student bodies, as well as staff members.According to QRC co-founder Nick Hanson-Holtry, the event served as a thematic continuation of the Queer State of the Union event hosted by Queers and Allies,  which occurred the day before the inauguration. “The purpose of it was to get everybody on campus who [might not] usually come to events on campus to come out and give us input,” Hanson-Holtry, a Sid Richardson College junior, said. “We are a resource center and we want to be getting at what resources people care about and which ones they don’t.” To conclude the initial activities of the QRC, the QRC task force held its first official meeting on Feb. 3. Hanson-Holtry said the purpose of the meeting was to organize committees and allow any interested members to get involved — as facilitators to a committee or solely as members who contribute with their presence and opinions. Hanson-Holtry also said the QRC aims to work with as many diversity groups on campus as possible, but their closest relationship will most likely be with the Women’s Resource Center. While the QRC is officially located in an office in the Rice Memorial Center basement, members of the QRC will volunteer with the WRC in its more visible office. “The QRC has a three-pronged mission statement [including] activism, visibility and support,” Hanson-Holtry said. “Visibility is huge, and if we are underground, no one is going to see us, no one is going to know who we are. [But we will] start doing speaker events and start doing activism and more — and having a space is kind of a secondary concern.”Hanson-Holtry said the QRC is not a completely new initiative; another Queer Resource Center was founded about 15 years prior, but, upon merging with the current Queers and Allies group, eventually disappeared. Hanson-Holtry said the QRC aims to remain a part of Rice just as the WRC has in past years. “We wanted to make sure that queer activism [doesn’t] go away on campus,” Hanson-Holtry said. “Maybe four years from now Query will disappear, maybe four years from now Q&A will disappear, but we wanted to establish something more permanent.” Hanson-Holtry said the QRC will be sustained through direct oversight from both the Office of Student Wellbeing and the Office of Multicultural Affairs, who will provide them with $1,000 each year if they hold an annual event aimed at promoting diversity on campus. According to Hanson-Holtry, the $5,000 awarded to the QRC from the SA40k will be used to bring in speakers and host events that relate to activism, although the plans have not been completely finalized. Nonetheless, Hanson-Houltry said he is thankful for the support and reaction from the student body.“It’s amazing that the student body has supported us and given $5,000 and [been] on board with everything,” Hanson-Holtry said. “I think it’s really exciting, and I can’t wait to see what happens in the course of the next semester.”Duncan sophomore Maria Emilia Duno said the creation of the QRC impacts the discussion on queer issues on campus overall.“I think that because Rice is so progressive in so many ways, people assume that there aren’t still queer issues that need to be addressed,” Duno said. “This space gives people who need their voices heard a platform from which to speak.”

NEWS 1/31/15 8:48am

Deans discuss teaching and technology at Rice

By Mengjia Liu

At a lecture sponsored by Scientia on Jan. 27, Dean of Humanities Nicolas Shumway and Dean of Social Sciences Lyn Ragsdale discussed challenges faced by their respective schools and the impact of technology on teaching at Rice.According to Ragsdale, the School of Social Sciences faces the challenge of large class sizes due to the popularity of its majors.“We have over 200 psychology majors and almost 200 economics majors at Rice,” Ragsdale said. “The average class across the entire curriculum in economics has 43 people in it and almost 50 in psychology. In addition, our intro classes are sort of bursting at the seams with 700 students a year in Intro to Psychology [(PSYC 101)].”Ragsdale said the school considered offering its large introductory classes online when the first wave of Massive Open Online Courses began, but the idea did not take off because faculty members were not enthusiastic about videotaping and creating online versions of their courses.“The social sciences currently have two summer classes that are solely online, but they are teaching very small numbers of students — roughly between four and eight students per summer,” Ragsdale said.However, Ragsdale said the School of Social Sciences has adopted technology in other ways to facilitate active learning and to allow students to study human behavior more effectively.“While we haven’t done the online component in the last five or six years, we have a number of courses across departments that are either flipped classrooms or are classes that take place outside of a truly academic setting,” Ragsdale said. “There is also an opportunity to actually engage students based on the way in which they like to communicate, such as through Facebook.”Shumway said technology will impact the educational system and research by enabling access to information and new methods of assembling information in ways that were inconceivable before.“Looking at a dissertation in music history now, [using technology,] you can actually see the score, hear the music and parse out the parts all at the same place and at the same time,” Shumway said.According to Shumway, the vast amount of information made available by technology poses new challenges.“When we generate knowledge, the first thing we do is eliminate all the information we cannot possibly deal with,” Shumway said. “We have to interpret, eliminate and organize. Technology has made that task so much more complicated because we have so much more information available.”Lecture attendee Mackenzie Nettlow said she expected more discussion on specific uses of technology in the classroom rather than generalizations."I thought the lecture was interesting, but I expected them to focus more on the actual classroom than what people would study outside the classroom or in research areas,” Nettlow, a McMurtry College junior, said.

NEWS 1/28/15 3:12pm

Kinder Institute expands to campus-wide think tank on urban research, community engagement

By Aparna Narendrula

The Kinder Institute for Urban Research is currently in the process of transitioning from being a part of Rice University’s School of Social Sciences to being a multidisciplinary campus-wide think tank, like the Baker Institute, according to Director of the Kinder Institute Bill Fulton. The institute was founded four years ago by professors Stephen L. Klineberg and Michael O. Emerson of the department of sociology.“The Kinder Institute is designed to use the resources on the Rice campus to do research into urban issues [and] issues of cities, particularly Houston,” Fulton said. “[The institute] then finds ways to work with politicians, civic organizations, private business and so forth to try to take the solutions to those urban challenges out into the real world and try to implement them and see whether they work.”Currently located in Sewall Hall, the expansion involves collaboration with the School of Architecture and the departments of civil engineering and computer science, among other disciplines. Fulton said the Kinder Institute will now broaden its approach to solving urban issues in order to achieve more visibility and a wider-reaching practical impact.“Certain aspects of its [past research] have had a very important impact. Professor Klineberg’s survey … has had a very important impact helping people in Houston understand what the city really is today,” Fulton explains. “Thirty years ago Houston was almost entirely white; today it is 45 percent Latino. It’s very multi-ethnic. There are various issues associated particularly with educational attainment of non-whites, so the Houston area survey has highlighted that.”The survey quantifies Houston area residents’ attitudes and beliefs in response to changes in the area. The institute aims to share the information found from the annual survey with scholars, leaders and the public.In the past, the Kinder Institute also worked on projects such as the Houston Education Research Consortium, through which scholars work with the Houston Independent School District to help administrators understand the effect of their programming.Fulton said he hopes for a future of collaboration between Rice’s two think tanks. Allen Matusow, academic director of the Baker Institute, also serves on the advisory board of the Kinder Institute. According to Fulton, the Kinder Institute emphasizes quantitative research, unlike the Baker Institute, although future plans involve more policy analysis.“The Baker Institute, as you may know, focuses largely on national and international issues. But we are beginning to talk about what the overlap is,” Fulton said. “The Baker Institute does very good work on health policy, for example. We do work on urban health here, particularly health in the urban areas. And so we are currently trying to identify areas of collaboration [between] local city and metropolis [analysis and their] state national and international stuff, so there will be some overlap and we are trying to identify how we do that.”For now, the 4-year-old institute will remain housed primarily in the basement of Sewall Hall. Fulton is thinking about future research on education, health and strengthening the global cities program. Fulton said he is particularly interested in the growth of the Houston region.“Houston is going to take its place as one of America’s and the world’s greatest cities,” Fulton said. “I think Houston is highly underappreciated. It’s a big, complicated, sophisticated cosmopolitan city. Our job is to help everybody else in the U.S. understand that Houston is a big, important city, and that lots of really great ideas about how to improve city life and how to deal with urban problems can come out of a city like Houston in addition to a place like New York or LA.”

NEWS 1/28/15 3:10pm

'Green dorm' promotes students' roles in environmental sustainability

By Drew Keller

The Rice University EcoRep Program is preparing for the February launch of the Green Dorm Initiative 2015, its biggest annual event, with hopes of educating Rice students about environmentally sustainable living through a contest designed to increase interactivity compared to past years.The Rice EcoRep Program, which includes members of all residential colleges, implemented the first GDI in 2011 as a means of gathering more information about the environmental habits of the student body. This year, however, the GDI has expanded to include more of an emphasis on sharing information on sustainability with students, according to Head EcoRep Zach Bielak.“This year, the structure of the competition has changed massively,” Bielak, a Sid Richardson College senior, said. “We took a step back and re-examined the purpose of GDI, and we decided to make it more focused on teaching students new things every day and also getting them to carry it through in their daily lives.”GDI 2015 focuses on three themes: Energy and Water, Wellbeing, and Waste. Each theme lasts one week and includes specific daily activities to complete. Participants can win prizes based on their involvement with the program. Bielak said the activities are no longer simply based on recording energy and water usage. “We are not really concerned just with dorm life anymore,” Bielak said. “We are focused on greener lifestyles in general, lifestyles that reach beyond just living spaces. We have days that are focused on biking to places, on building community and on getting outside.”EcoRep Lindsy Pang, a Martel College junior, said the daily activities are designed to encourage sustainable practices without taking up much of students’ time.“Sustainable living is easy,” Pang said. “It is all about paying attention to what you do and creating new habits. They say it takes 21 days to develop a new habit. GDI helps with this by making the process educational, fun and interactive.”Bielak also said the GDI hopes to promote lifestyle changes, which would have a lasting impact beyond the three weeks of activities.“Our sole goal in hosting [GDI] is to get participants to start critically examining their lifestyles and behaviors and perhaps start to change them,” Bielak said. “There are so many irresponsible and wasteful actions that we commit every day without even thinking about it, and we [hope] that GDI will start shedding some light on these actions and issues.”Richard Johnson, the director of the Administrative Center for Sustainability and Energy Management, said the GDI has the potential to not only improve environmentally friendly practices at Rice, but also to inspire students to pursue sustainable research and careers.“I’ve not met a Rice student who isn’t interested in the betterment of the world,” Johnson said. “The GDI will give students an easy way that they can pursue this from an environmental perspective.”According to Bielak, the EcoReps’ goal is to have 500 students involved  in this year’s program, which would mark an increase from last year’s total number of participants. Students have until Jan. 31 to sign up for GDI online, after which the contests begin.“We believe that this year will be the best yet,” Bielak said. “I think the change of structure will get more people involved on a daily basis and will also retain the interest of people who have done GDI in the past by giving them new things to think about.”Johnson emphasized the collective nature of this year’s GDI as one of its most important attributes.“It will foster a shared culture of sustainability on campus,” Johnson said. “It’s not just an individual activity; it’s also a community activity, a shared experience.” Brown College freshman Radhika Sharma said the community aspect of the GDI drew her to the program.“What really appeals to me is the opportunity to participate in an activity with a bunch of friends and like-minded people who want to support environmental causes,” Sharma said. “[The GDI is] a chance to work for a common cause that is important to our collective values – sustainability [and] the environment.”

NEWS 1/28/15 3:09pm

FERPA records requests reveal little

By Drew Keller

Rice University students hoping to gain access to admissions records through a 40-year-old federal law may not find the revealing information they expect, according to Director of Admissions Dan Warner. A website started by Stanford University students, the Fountain Hopper, recently piqued interest in accessing admissions records by publicizing the Family Education Rights and Privacy Act and urging Stanford students to request their records. This 1974 law, known as FERPA, allows students to request access to their admissions records at any university receiving federal funding, but has rarely been used for this purpose historically. Warner said he had not received any FERPA requests at Rice until the Fountain Hopper published its article; since then, the admissions office has received around a dozen.“The law has been in place for 40 years,” Warner said. “I’ve been in admissions for 25 years, and it’s been 20 years since I’ve gotten a FERPA request at any of the schools where I’ve worked. So it’s not a usual thing.”By law, the university has 45 days after a request to comply and provide the students with their records. The information provided depends on the department from which it is requested; for example, a student would receive different information from the registrar’s office or the admissions office.“Different offices retain different information at the same institution, and the same office might retain different information at different institutions,” Warner said. “We might, for example, keep different information on file permanently [from] Stanford.”According to Warner, the admissions office does not keep most of the records used during the consideration process, including teacher recommendations, internal notes and almost all material authored by the student.“It’s interesting for students to exercise  [their FERPA] rights,” Warner said. “Frankly, it’s a nice professional development opportunity for my staff – but at the same time, there’s not a whole lot of information of the nature I suspect students are wanting.”Warner said the admissions office does keep demographic information such as name and address, as well as test scores, while the registrar’s office also retains students’ high school transcripts and test scores. Additionally, the admissions office keeps records of messages sent out to prospective students, including whether messages have been opened by students, according to Warner.“We can do some analysis on how many messages were opened, how many students actually came, so we can assess the efficacy of different messages and our process,” Warner said.Warner also said the office keeps certain pieces of information about matriculated students to generate a profile of the incoming class for publicity, with information such as the number of class presidents or students involved in community service.“We aggregate that information,” Warner said. “[But] there’s really not any need for [most records]. Once a student is admitted and matriculating to Rice, we don’t have a need to keep [the information].”According to Warner, students wishing to see records must submit a request to a particular office. The admissions office is developing a process to provide information to students. “We’re not going to get 1,000 requests like Stanford has gotten, but we obviously want to facilitate multiple requests,” Warner said. Under the new system, Warner said the admissions office would likely schedule appointments during which they would show students their electronic records. However, the office is not required to and will not provide a hard copy, partially to protect the proprietary software used to organize student information. According to Warner, students who made information requests should receive a response from the admissions office detailing next steps sometime in the coming week.Warner said the increased attention to FERPA requests will not have any effect on the practices of the admissions office in the future.“We’re still going to ask for the same information we asked for in the past,” Warner said. “Every year we try to improve on what we do but it’s largely going to be the same.”

NEWS 1/28/15 3:08pm

Class size growth prompts concerns

By Jieya Wen

The size of Rice University’s student body has increased by 36 percent over the last 12 years as called for by President David Leebron’s Vision for the Second Century; however, the growth has prompted some students and faculty to express concerns about class sizes. According to Leebron and Dean of Undergraduates John Hutchinson, the administration has addressed this by hiring more faculty and looking further into optimal class sizes.

NEWS 1/28/15 3:06pm

SA revamps election timeline, voting

By Amber Tong

The 2015 General Elections have officially begun and according to Director of Elections Austin Cao, they will be conducted through an improved version of Owlection, a program that contributed to the partial invalidation of last year’s elections.Positions to be contested are the Student Association Executive Board and Blanket Tax organization leadership, including Rice Student Volunteer Program, Honor Council, University Court, Rice Program Council, Campanile, Thresher, KTRU, RTV and Sammy the Owl.In the first-round elections of 2014, two candidates, Lovett College junior Min Ji Kim and McMurtry College senior Trent Navran ran for the SA presidency. Navran gained the most votes in the election, but it was found that a loophole in the Owlection system permitted alumni to vote. “Last year in the first round of elections, we allowed all Rice students who had a NetID to vote in the general elections,” Cao, a Hanszen College freshman, said. “We discovered last year that there were alumni who voted, so we had to redo the elections.”Two SA senators filed a petition to contest the results, citing this issue as one of their four claims. University Court acknowledged the validity of two of the four filed complaints and partially invalidated the outcome of the presidential election. Consequently, a re-run of the entire elections was held via Qualtrics as opposed to Owlection. Ravi Sheth, the current SA President, ran as a write-in candidate in this second round and won; Ravi then appointed Navran as the SA executive vice president. In addition, three candidates began running for the position of SA internal vice president in the second round, when none had run in the first round; Hanszen College sophomore Sai Chilakapati won the position. The election re-run also saw a greater turnout than in the first time it was held, although several candidates were afraid a 20 percent quorum would not be reached. In light of the invalidation of first-round elections results last year, Cao said this loophole has been corrected.According to Cao, the Election Committee will again utilize Owlection, a webapp developed by Rice Apps, in the voting process. Cao said Owlection now has built-in functionalities that will restrict the pool of eligible voters to the currently enrollwed undergraduate population.“Our solution now is to get a list of all the current undergraduates from the Registrar first,” Cao said. “We’re now able to limit voting to that specified list of Rice undergraduates.”According to Cao, this year marks the beginning of a move toward the full adoption of Owlections, which shows support of Rice student initiatives.“In terms of the voting system itself, we don’t want to rely on third-party software anymore,” Cao said. “We want to continue using Owlections, which was created by Rice students, and continue to support them and help them make it more stable.”In addition, Cao said a webapp is currently under development so that, in the near future, candidates may turn in electronic rather than paper copies of their petitions. According to Cao, online submission could potentially become available in time for the second-round elections.“Our Director of Technology, Xilin Liu, has been developing a webapp for submitting petitions,” Cao said. “That way we can guarantee that people are getting the right number of signatures, that there aren’t repeats and that petitions don’t get lost in the process of turning them in.”Along with its decision to invalidate first-round election results, in a letter written last year, UCourt also emphasized the importance of publicizing meetings held by the Election Committee. Two of the petition statements that were not validated by UCourt were concerned with Cao said the Election Committee will remain transparent throughout the process.“All of our meetings are open to the public,” Cao said. “We’ll announce it on the SA website. [If anyone] wants to come join … they can definitely stop by.” 

NEWS 1/21/15 6:14pm

Student Judicial Programs revises Code of Conduct

By Sapna Suresh

Student Judicial Programs released an updated student Code of Conduct that went into effect beginning Jan. 12. According to their website, they aim “to articulate and enforce standards of conduct behavior among all students.” The new code includes several key updates that provide details on many aspects of student behavior.

NEWS 1/21/15 6:05pm

27-day homeless challenge pushes student to self-reflection, policy efforts

By Anita Alem

“Homeless but not hopeless. Happy holidays!” read a sign held by Hanszen College senior Chris Chu while panhandling in Washington, D.C. Chu slept outside of metro stations, panhandled and contemplated stealing food during a 27-day period in which he lived among the homeless in Washington, D.C. as part of an effort to better understand them.

NEWS 1/21/15 5:42pm

Rice hosts second ever Symposium on Teaching and Learning

By Amber Tong

Rice University’s second ever Symposium on Teaching and Learning focused on providing practical tips on how to connect with students. The symposium, which took place on Jan. 16, featured a roundtable discussion, a keynote address and multiple Rice faculty teaching demonstrations.

NEWS 1/14/15 5:16pm

Leebron ranks seventh in compensation study

By Andrew Ligeralde

Rice President David Leebron is the seventh highest paid private university president in the country. A recent study by the Chronicle of Higher Education found that in 2012, the last year for which data has been released, Leebron’s total compensation amounted to $1,522,502. 

NEWS 1/14/15 5:13pm

IT and CTE pilot cloud-based 'clicker' system

By Maha Aziz

Rice Information Technology and the Center for Teaching Excellence are collaborating to implement a new cloud-based clicker system to replace existing iClickers. According to Carlyn Chatfield, Manager of Rice IT Technical Communications, the system will be university-wide by fall 2015.

NEWS 1/14/15 5:12pm

Obama calls for new college ratings system

By Sapna Suresh

The United States Department of Education announced its proposal for a new rating method for institutions of higher learning on Dec. 19, 2014. Based on recent rankings of colleges with the best affordability, retention rate and diversity, Rice appears to rate highly on the scale.

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