Author: wmf008

By Rachel Chou, Contributing Writer

The 2013 fall semester will include the highest number of international students in University history.

A total of 89 new international students, a number that includes first-years, exchange and non-degree students, transfers, and language teaching assistants, will join the student body this semester, according to Jennifer Figueroa, director of International Student Services.

These new students represent 31 countries from around the world, from places as close as Canada and as far as Zimbabwe.

Fifty-seven of the 88 participants in International Orientation were undergraduates, including dual citizens and permanent residents. Of those 57, three were transfer students, Figueroa said.

As far as demographic representation, China and Brazil make up the largest percentage of new students this year. This year’s International Orientation hosted 31 Chinese students, to make a total of 86 Chinese students on campus this fall.

The increase in students from Brazil is due to the nation’s Scientific Mobility Program Scholarship, which has already provided 18 students with an opportunity to study at the University for one year as non-degree students. Eight current University students take part in the program.

By Shannon Beauregard

University President John Bravman announced the implementation of a new medical amnesty policy in an email to the University community on Aug. 1.

“The University hopes that the new policy will encourage students to make immediate medical emergency phone calls when their fellow students are intoxicated and unable to help themselves,” Dean of Students Susan Lantz said.

Unlike the previous rule, the new policy eliminates the one-amnesty limit. A student is able to receive emergency medical attention numerous times without penalty. No points or fines will be allocated when a student is reported by a friend to be dangerously intoxicated. Additionally, if a student requires medical attention due to alcohol abuse during a team or club event, the organization will not be penalized for reporting that student. The parents of students that require emergency services will still be notified and be referred to an Alcohol and Other Drugs Counselor.

Under the old policy, an intoxicated student was allowed one opportunity to receive medical attention without severe consequences. The first time a student was reported to be dangerously intoxicated by a fellow student, the intoxicated student received one point, a $25 fine, and was referred to an Alcohol and Other Drugs counselor. After a second incident, the intoxicated student faced more severe penalties including suspension or expulsion.

“The University recognized that the old policy had the potential to discourage students from contacting us when the safety of another student was at stake. Now that students do not have to worry about getting points in those situations, we hope we’ve made the decision to immediately call us for help an easier one,” Chief of Public Safety Steve Barilar said.

The new policy prioritizes the health and safety of students above all else.

“[If] someone is in trouble, call for help–please,” Bravman said.

This policy was changed partly because of the University’s participation in the National College Health Improvement Project (NCHIP) Learning Collaborative on High-Risk Drinking (commonly called the NCHIP Collaborative),started by Dartmouth  in 2011.

“It became clear from our conversations at NCHIP learning sessions and from our research that institutions were ensuring that they had policies (including amnesty) and practices in place to encourage students to reach out for assistance,” Lantz said.

 Somer Dice

Contributing Writer

The student organization Common Ground has begun circulating posters to initiate conversation among students about the divide between Greek and non-Greek affiliates.

The campaign, called “Imagine a Bucknell where … ” is part of a campaign to call attention to groups that “are sometimes taken for granted by the campus community,” said Ana Aguilera Silva ’14 of the Common Ground Staff of 2013.

Student staff members Silva, Xander Vining ’14 and Anthony Gomez ’16 said in an email to The Bucknellian that there is a common feeling among University students that “Greeks are prevalent in our community and dominate the social scene, while Independents are just here to study.”

Common Ground began advertising to draw attention to the program and encourage students to explore cultural and social issues on campus.

“Greeks and Independents aren’t getting along. We’re just trying to show them we’re all the same,” retreat facilitator Stephanie Gonthier ’15 said.

Common Ground is a student-run diversity immersion retreat that takes place during Fall Break and is designed to expand students’ worldviews surrounding issues like gender, race and socioeconomic standing.

The Common Ground staff said that future posters in the campaign will feature tokenism as well as other racial, social and cultural issues at the University.

W. Morris Fierman

The Pennsylvania House of Representatives recently passed a measure to privatize the state’s liquor stores and sell wine and spirits permits to private vendors.

The measure, pushed for by Governor Tom Corbett, passed the house without a single Democrat voting in favor. The bill will now move to the State Senate and is likely to be heavily deliberated.

Pennsylvania is home to some of the most stringent controls on the sale of wine and spirits in the nation. The state is one of 18 to maintain a monopoly over the sale of such beverages.

“We do need to modernize our alcohol sales system and there is much we can do to accomplish that without putting 5,000 state workers out of work, putting hundreds of family-owned beer distributorships out of business, increasing alcohol-related deaths and crime and selling a state asset that generates hundreds of millions of dollars for our general fund,” Democratic State Representative Phyllis Mundy said.

Controlling the sale of wine and spirits has provided a steady source of revenue for the cash-strapped state, though Corbett has said that he believes the sale of permits to vendors as well as future taxation would balance out in the end.

Most supporters of privatization claim that controlling wine and spirits sales is not a vital state function and that the current system is outdated.

State Senator Gene Yaw, a Republican whose constituency includes the University, said in an interview with The Bucknellian that the main concern for constituents was convenience. People wishing to purchase alcohol must go to a state-run store, while in most states they can do anywhere alcohol is sold.

Mundy also agreed that her constituency was telling her that convenience was a priority. The measure passed by the House allows for beer distributors to have priority in buying the 1,200 licenses that will become available. Grocery stores, which were given the ability to sell beer in 2010, will be able to stock wine but not spirits or malt beverages.

Washington state passed a measure last year to privatize its liquor stores and consumers have noticed a significant spike in prices due to taxation by the state. Reuters reported that prices were about 10 to 30 percent higher statewide after the privatization plan was carried out.

When asked about the effect privatization would have on prices, Yaw said “I don’t know. I’ve heard both sides of the argument.”

As for the possibility of the bill passing the State Senate in its current form,  “No,” said Yaw.

W. Morris Fierman

News Editor

Despite a national trend of colleges and universities struggling to meet new requirements to deal with instances of sexual misconduct, several years of changing policies have put the University ahead of the curve.

The

Universities’ policies have been forced to evolve by a series of court decisions that made schools liable for dealing with and preventing sexual assault.

A 2007 suit filed against the University of Georgia initiated a precedent which placed the responsibility for responding to and actively preventing sexual misconduct firmly in institutions’ hands. A Federal Appeals Court ruled in favor of a student after she was  raped by a fellow student who had a history of being removed from other schools for several sexual assaults.

Since the University of Georgia suit, cases at the University of North Carolina, the University of Colorado at Boulder and the University of Washington resulted in rulings against the schools and were filed specifically under Title IX. The Department of Education officially stated in April 2011 that it would be reinterpreting Title IX to include sexual assault as a form of gender-based discrimination.

University administrations have met the new legal obligations with varying amounts of success.

In early January, Senior Writer for the Daily Tar Heel, the student-run newspaper of the University of North Carolina, Caitlin McCabe was approached by two female students claiming that they had been sexually assaulted and were treated poorly and unfairly by the university administration. One of the students told McCabe that during her hearing in the university’s ‘Honor Court’ one administrator asked her why she had not simply broken up with her long-time boyfriend that was sexually and verbally abusive. She also believed that the members of the court implied that because of her psychological distress and a past suicide attempt, her account could not be trusted.

In a telephone interview with The Bucknellian, McCabe, whose coverage later attracted national media attention, said that her university has since hired several new staff members, including a “Title IX coordinator and a sexual assault investigator,” in an attempt to fix the broken policies, though so far there have been no additions to the slideshow about sexual assault shown to first-years during orientation for several years.

Mishandled cases such as this one come along with a national trend of changing conversation about sexual assault. Many universities have struggled to update programs and policies in the face of federal pressure to do so.

According to Director of the Women’s Resource Center Tracy Russell Shaynak, the University has been both supportive and proactive in working to make cultural changes that prevent sexual assault, and more changes are yet to come.

The Women’s Resource Center will soon be hiring an Interpersonal Violence Prevention Coordinator to oversee further improvements to sexual misconduct education programs at the University. Their salary will be paid for from a grant to the University from the Justice Department for $300,000, awarded to the school in the fall of 2012. The grant, which was applied for with the help of several administrative departments, professors and students, was a good indication from the federal government that the University’s efforts were moving toward the needed changes, according to Shaynak.

Considering the administration and President John Bravman’s actions on the issue of sexual assault, “I think we are very much headed in the right direction,” Shaynak said.

Students involved in the Speak UP Bucknell program, a program designed to educate students about sexual misconduct that is now entirely student run, have tended to agree with the University’s campaign.

“I think other schools shy away from publishing things like the Campus Climate Report, but they need to acknowledge the problem before anything can be done,” Laura Even ’14, a peer educator in the Speak UP program, referring to a report on student experiences at the University that includes a study of sexual misconduct on campus.

As The Bucknellian reported earlier this month, the number of reported instances of sexual assault was around five percent higher at the University last year as compared to the national rate, according to a survey of the student body conducted by the American College Health Survey. Those numbers, however, only include students who have reported being sexually assaulted to University officials.

Associate Professor of Psychology Bill Flack has conducted extensive research along with a team of University students that has tracked the number of sexual assaults at the University since 2002. Flack reported that the previous semester’s anonymous survey of 364 female sophomores, juniors and seniors revealed that 49.1 percent of female students were sexually assaulted during their time at the University. A survey of 251 male students found that 11.6 percent of men admitted anonymously to committing a sexual assault. Those numbers, which have stayed relatively consistent since Flack and his students began the research, are “significantly higher than the national numbers.”

When asked to think of a possible reason as to why this was, Flack said that he suspects “part of the reason we have such a high rate is that, and this is speculation, there are such unequal power relationships on campus” between men and women. Fraternities have houses while sororities do not, Flack added, and sororities usually do not have control over who is placed on registers or guest lists.

“It’s also usually boys who are mixing alcohol into that punch, which is, by the way, the most common date rape drug,” Flack said.

It is also not clear that the higher numbers are endemic of a small, liberal arts school like the University. The similar research of a colleague of Flack’s at Middlebury College in Vermont has yielded much lower rates of sexual assault than on this campus.

As for the University’s new Speak UP program, only in its first year since implementation, it will be several years before any change in numbers will happen–even then it will be difficult to definitively attribute any change in the overall rate of sexual misconduct to the program, Flack said.

No conclusive scientific research has yet surfaced about what works best at reducing sexual assaults in colleges. Some of the fiercest debate involves whether or not the preventative education programs being adopted by many universities will be effective in addressing the problem.

Another criticism of a program like Speak UP is that it is heavily bystander focused; that is, it attempts to train bystanders to prevent sexual assault.

“We need to find a way of telling boys not to rape,” Flack said, though he conceded that perhaps the best solution would be instruction by parents about consent long before students arrive at colleges.

“We are taking a blunt instrument to something we don’t understand [with the Speak UP program],” Flack said. “We don’t yet know how the student intimacy culture works,” referring to the changing social habits of college students and the rise of the ‘hook-up.’

Either way, “we are doing a much better job than we used to,” Flack said.