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®ie Gamecock Kisses from page 1 “It [Dance Marathon] was close to their hearts,” Cullen said. Dance Marathon is a 28-hour event to raise money for the Palmetto Richland Children’s Hospital. Dancers collect donations of at least $150 to participate and theh meet with children from the hospital. “Most of the money goes toward the neo-natal unit,” Cullen said. She said the money raised by Dance Marathon in the past had been used to buy an ambulance and other pieces of equip ment for the hospital. This year’s dancers’ meetings will be . 1 held Oct. 24 at 7:15 p.m. in the Russell House Ballroom and Oct. 25 at 8:30 p.m. in Russell House room 323. The event it self takes place on Feb. 23 and 24. England said her past involvement in Dance Marathon and driving the Kiss mobile stemmed front an interest in help ing children. “Mainly, I’m just a very huge advo cate for Children’s Miracle Network, and Heishey’s [Kissmobile] is a very great way to get people’s interest,” England said. “I’m getting to see the country while doing a really great thing for children,” she said. The Kissmobile traveled to Colum bia from Chicago. It arrives in Florence on Wfednesday and travels to Myrtle Beach on Friday. Then it goes to New Orleans. The Kissmobile driven by England . r and Lentel is one of two that will travel 50,000 miles this year. Each chocolate ambassador serves for two months. As for being back at her alma mater, England said she was enjoying her visit to use. “It’s wonderful,” she said. “It makes me miss school.” Not that it sounds like she’d give up traveling the country in the Kissmobile. “I love it,” England said. The university desk can be reached at gamecockudesk@hotmail.coin. r . i bteps taKen to enrorce saiety rules by Gina Caruso The Gamecock University officials have recently tak en steps to enforce fire safety regulations after learning of an increase in viola tions around campus. Some residents are ignoring housing regulations against candles, heaters and extension cords. USC Police, Columbia Fire Depart ment, USC Office of Health arid Safety Programs, along with University Hous ing, all work together to ensure resident safety, according to Associate Director for Residence Life Andrew Fink. Fink encouraged students to become familiar with University Housing regula tions concerning fire protection, and re ferring to a brochure put out by United States Fire Administration, Fink outlined some simple precautions to take so fires can be prevented. Students should clean up all trash in their rooms, extinguish all smoking ma terials thoroughly and be sure that any halogen lamps are kept away from flam mables and contain a safety ‘cage’ cover properly attached. Sockets shouldn’t be overloaded, so extension cords and mul tiple socket plugs are prohibited in all res idence halls and university housing facil ities, Fink said. While suige protectors are permit -w r* ted, u.*./erity policy states that only one surgt protector may be plugged into a socket, and at no time may one sutge pro tector be plugged into another surge pro tector. Residents are never to tamper with smoke detectors in their room. At the be ginning of each semester, detectors and alarms should be checked to make sure they are in proper working condition. Should a detector malfunction or ap pear defective, residents are to immedi ately notify housing maintenance at 7 FIXX, Fink said. Other suggestions for protection of fered by Fink include planning escape routes and taking fire alarms seriously. “Residents should know where all ex its are in the building as well as the pre determined route of escape,” he said. Fink stressed that the misuse of fire alarms and safety equipment is a viola tion of university policy and state law. If someone is caught disabling the equip ment, they will face prosecution, likely suspension from the university and im mediate removal from university hous ing. Furthermore, according to universi ty policy, no person is to start a fire or create a fire hazard on university prop erty without university authorization. This regulation is also intended to prohibit the 'l-V S i *l possession and/or use of materials such as candles, torches and incense, as all de vices might create a fire hazard. Maliciously pulled alarms, tampered equipment and other such activity is a sig nificant inconvenience to other students living in the building. Therefore, Fink strongly encourages students to report any suspicious activity. “Residents are urged to report the names of any people tampering with fire safety equipment to the university police at 74215 or Residence life at 7 4129,” he said But some USC students have a dif ferent opinion about the housing regula tions. “I believe that many students break the rules. I have extensions cords in my room even though they arern't allowed. What do they expect when the couple of outlets provided are in inconvenient places?” said a Columbia Hall resident who wished to remain anonymous. Another student felt the regulations were a good thing and should be enforced “The rules don’t bother me,” Jason Flores, a Moore resident, said. “I have no problems with them, but I’m sure others do,” he said. The university desk can be reached at gamecockudesk@hotmail.com. lr you arinK, uon i anve. Have a designated driver. . r . 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The Creed’s 10th anniversary is being celebrated this year as Creed Week continues. The weeklong event, meant to raise awareness of the Creed, kicked off Monday. The setting was the late 1980s, and colleges nationwide were dealing with headlines about rape, hazing and hate crimes. Some of the institutions enacted speech codes. And while those working on the Creed didn’t necessarily know what they want ed, they knew what they didn’t want. “The speech code stuff really, really drove us,” Pruitt said. Pruitt said he felt that the speech codes at least bordered on being illegal. “If you’re going to protect freedom of speech, you have to allow it,” Pruitt said. Pruitt said the university had “volumes and volumes of rules” -135 pages of them. “Nowhere did we tell students what constitutes appropri ate behavior or ideal behavior or behavior to aspire to,” he said. That’s what the task force set out to do. It was something of a daunting task. For one thing, there were few, if any, precedents. According to Pruitt, the Creed was one of the first of its kind nationwide. “We had no model,” Pruitt said. “We started from scratch.” In fact, one of the initial thoughts was that the process would help USC, Pruitt said. The commission that was to create the Creed had several different subcommittees to deal with different issues, Pruitt said. He said the group included Greeks, minorities, interna tional students and gays. The group’s official mission was to investigate the rela tionships between university students, to define the universi ty’s expectations and values and to communicate those values to students. The year after it began work in 1989, the group came up with the concept of the Carolinian Creed. It crafted the docu ment’s ten tenets and presented the documents to the govern ing bodies of the university. Among the bodies that endorsed the Creed were the board # The Carolinian Creed The community of scholars at the University c South Carolina is dedicated to personal and acaderr ic excellence. Choosing to join the communit obligates each member to a code of civilized beha\ ior. As a Carolinian... I will practice personal and academic integrity; I will respect the dignity of all persons; I will respect the rights and property of others; I will discourage bigotry, while striving to lear from differences in people, ideas, and opinions; 1 will demonstrate concern for others, their feeling and their need for conditions which support thei work and development. Allegiance to these ideals requires each Carolinia to refrain from and discourage behaviors whic threaten the freedom and respect every individut observes. of trustees, the National Advisory Board, Faculty Senate, Sti dent Senate and the Residence Hall Association. Ten years later, Pruitt said the Creed is making an impac He said research shows that most USC students have encour tered the Creed, and it has had an impact on behavior on can pus. He also said many students admit to having broken th Creed when they go into judicial hearings at the universit; And the Creed mirrors the university’s mission state ment, Pruitt said. When the Creed was completed, a document analysis w; run on both the Creed and the university’s mission statemen “The values expressed in the Creed and the values expresse in the mission statement were quite similar,” Pruitt said. There is only one thing Pruitt said he would change: add clause about “stewardship for society.” However, Pruitt said the university didn’t just get the re ward out of the process, as had been hoped origionally. “We got that, and we got a lot more.” The university desk can be reached at gamecockudesk@hotmail.com. Professor admits to affair with stlldfint hut nn nnp hplipvpc him by Billy O’Keefe College Press Exchange Oh, what Bill Clinton wouldn’t give to be Sam Kashner. According to the former College of William and Mary creative writing pro fessor, Kashner, like Clinton, had a glo rious workplace affair with a young woman. Also like Clinton, his affair has been made public, in this case through a prose con fession in the October issue of GQ Mag azine. Here’s the enviable part: No one be lieves the guy cheated. Not even his wife. And especially not the William and Mary community, which is less than thrilled with Kashner’s representation of the col lege. In “The Professor of Desire,” Kash ner writes of his descent into “a moral mosh pit” of beautiful, hungry young stu dents hailing from carnivorous backgrounds and in search of a man they could trust and eventually conquer. “It doesn’t take much for them to fall in love with you,” Kashner writes. “As a professor of creative writing, you tend to get the dreamers, the romantics, the weirdos. Spend 20 minutes talking about young Keats, show that drawing of the young poet on his deathbed in Rome and it’s shooting fish in a barrel. Kashner goes into explicit detail about the behavior and mindset of his stu dents, even offering supposedly verbatim copies of written assignments that stu dents used to detail their epic adventures in, and eventual boredom with, sex. Eventually, he writes, the stories of his students’ sex lives consumed him. It was all that mattered. In true “American Beauty” style, Kashner bought a NordicTrack, lost his love handles and devised methods of hid ing his bald spot from students. What followed was a seven-month affair with a college student that culmi nated with sex in her dorm room, fol lowed by the revelation that she was a married woman. The student’s husband, after finding out about the affair, hanged himself in a shower on campus, leaving a suicide note that blamed Kashner for his death. After that incident, Kashner writes, he had become a “pariah” on campus. But Terry Meyers, chairman of the English department at William and Mary, contests that Kashner never needed a trip to the campus doghouse until, perhaps, now. Meyers said when he spoke with him, Kashner denied ever having sex with a William and Mary student or with any student. Kashner then told the Chronicle of Higher Education that Meyers misun derstood their conversation, but Meyers said Kashner’s denial was explicit and clear and laigely unnecessary in the first place. “Tltis is a small town; it’s a small col lege, and it’s a pretty gossipy town,” Mey ers said. “And I think that if Sant was re ally having an affair, I probably would’ve * ^ m m. m .m. m. heard about it a lot sooner than now.” That goes double, he said, for the hus band’s suicide, reports of which never sur faced on campus, as well as the reaction of Kashner’s wife, fellow William and Mary professor Nancy Schoenberger. “People are asking, ‘How’s Nancy? How’s she taking this?”’ Meyers said. “And the response usually is, ‘She’s not bothered, because she knows it’s not true. ’” The William and Mary community isn’t quite so forgiving. An editorial in the Flat Hat, the school’s student newspaper, blasted Kashner and said that he has “dragged the college’s name through the mud.” “One would hope that Kashner would have had the respect not to misrepre sent the entire campus in a national publication,” read the editorial. “It is an unfortunate, yet irreparable, situation that the college’s name is tainted by this dis tortion. Anyone coming to the college expecting Kashner’s world will be sore ly disappointed.” Meyers hoped a resolution will soon come to pass and that Kashner, who left the college this year to write lull time, will admit to his sins, or, in this case, a lack thereof. “It’s hard to convey what kind of per son Sam is,” Meyers said. “He’s delight ful, witty, wry, subtle. He’s a fiction writer, and a good one at that. He lives in a world of fantasy. “The long and short of it: Sam Kashner has written a work of fiction.” 1 ._ I and more on... Mondays 6-8pm for Punk show tune in! , V ' *•