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Quote, Unquote - ‘One day you’re drinking wine, and the next day you’re picking grapes.’ Lou Holtz, on recently fired Alabama football coach Mike Dubose Whe (Bmccock a Serving the Carolina Community since 1Q08 * Editorial Board Brock Vergakis • Editor in Chief Kevin Langston • Viewpoints Editor Nathan White • Asst. Viewpoints Editor Patrick Rathbun • Editorial Contributor Brad Walters • Editorial Contributor Martha Wright • Editorial Contributor All syllabuses should be available online £ For many students, the days of not being able to make in formed decisions on which classes to register for might be over. Slowly but surely, more USC professors are posting their class syllabuses online, which prevents students from having to register for a class almost completely ignorant of what that class will ex pect from them. By simply logging on to www.sc.edu and navigat ing to the college of their choice, students can find out whether the courses they’re taking next semester have syllabuses, or at least class descriptions, posted online. In many cases, professors’ individual Web sites will contain in formation about the classes they’re teaching next semester. And some departments — English and computer engineering, for ex ample — have in-depth descriptions posted online for all their classes. s Kudos to the professors who have taken the initiative to post * all their class descriptions and syllabuses online. All professors should follow this example — it not only helps the student, but it also helps the professor in that the students enrolled in their class es will be sufficiently prepared and ready to learn. Legislation would help improve SG elections Today, the Student Government senate will vote on legisla tion that will have a definite and immediate impact on SG elections in February. The legislation consists of four amendments that are designed to make the election process more ^ ( democratic and, more importantly, more open to candidates. These amendments would modify the elections codes to allow person-to-person campaigning (i.e. direct distribution of campaign materials) the week of the elections, allow campaigning within buildings that contain a computer lab “polling location” (but not the polling location itself), set a forum for the candidates to debate and present themselves to candidates and change campaign spend ing limits to spending “suggestions.” These amendments would allow for a more democratic process by encouraging candidates to campaign more effectively and reach out to the student body. Also, the amendments would allow the student body to become more informed of who the candidates are and what they plan to do if elected. Most importantly, these amendments would make Student y Government offices more competitive by giving nonestablished students a better chance of winning elections against incumbent or established candidates. For all these reasons, student senate should pass this legislation. About Us The Gamecock is the student newspaper of The University of South Carolina and is published Monday, Wednesday and Friday during the fall and spring semesters and nine times during the summer with the exception of university holidays and exam periods. Opinions expressed in The Gamecock are those of the editors or author and not those of The University of South Carolina. The Board of Student Publications and Communications is the publisher of The Gamecock. The Department of Student Media is the newspaper's parent organization. The Gamecock is supported in part by student activities fees. Address The Gamecock 1400 Greene Street Columbia, SC 29208 Offices on third floor of the Russell House. n Student Media Area code 803 Advertising 777-3888 Classified 777-1184 Fax 777-6482 Office 777-3888 Gamecock Area code 803-777-7726 Editor in Chief gamecockeditor@hotmail.com University Desk gamecockudesk@hotmail.com City/State Desk gamecockcitydesk@hotmail.com Viewpoints gamecockviewpoints@hotmail.com Spotlight gamecockspotlight@hotmail.com Sports gamecocksports@hotmail.com The Gamecock Brock Vergakis Editor in Chief Brandon Larrabee University Editor John Huiett City/State Editor Kevin Langston Viewpoints Editor Jared Kelowitz Day Sports Editor Kyle Almond Night Sports Editor Mackenzie Clements Jason Harmon Ashley Melton Brad Walters Martha Wright Copy Editors ft ' „~ «•_ ^ - MacKenzie Craven Spotlight Editor Travis Lynn Sean Rayford Photo Editors Charles Prashaw Amanda Silva Asst. University Editors John Bailey Asst. City/State Editor Nathan White Asst. Viewpoints Editor Aubrey Fitzloff Miranda LaLonde Ann Marie Miani Jennie Moore Katie Sm,ith Page Designers Submission Policy Letters to the editor or guest columns are welcome from all members of the Carolina community. Letters should be 250-300 words. Guest columns should be an opinion piece of about 600 words. Both must include name, phone number, profes sional title or year and major, if a student. Handwritten submissions must be personally delivered to Russell House room 333. E-mail submissions must include tele phone number for confirmation and should be sent to gamecockviewpointsdhotmail.com. The Gamecock reserves the right to edit for libel, style and space. Anonymous letters will not be pub lished. Photos are required for guest columnists and can > be provided by the submitter. Call 777-7726 for more information. Sruoorr Mcdia Erik Collins Faculty Adviser Ellen Parsons Director of Student Media Susan King Creative Director Sean Oe Luna Todd Hooks Melanie Hutto Emilie Moca Martin Salisbury Creative Services Carolyn Griffin Business Manager Jannell Deyo Robyn Gombar Kera Khalil Denise Levereaux Brantley Roper Nicole Russell Advertising Staff Jonathan Dunagin Interim Ad Manager Sherry F. Holmes Classified Manager College Press Exchange \ CN&NEX GNBCSS Reflections on Graduating The long and winding road So... all good things must come to a close. In about two weeks, my college career will be offi cially over. Suffice to say, I’m freakin’ out, man. The snide grin on my face in the picture you see to your right has been replaced with a look of desperation and apprehension that seems to get worse with each passing day. Nonetheless, my time spent here at USC was the most wonderful 4 1/2 years of my life thus far. I will cherish my college mem ories forever. I look forward to the townie portion of my life that will be directly following my graduation. What can I say? I can’t let go that quickly. Anyway, I’d like to take a few mo ments to recollect some of my fondest memories of Columbia and USC. Cheers to a very drunken freshman year in Snowden. It was a hellhole, but it had character, and hey, it was home. I lived on the third floor facing the roof and learned to love the smell of urine after awhile. My friends were hard-drinking South erners from Spartanburg who got my scrawny ass sick on more than a few oc casions. I spent many a drunken weekend in the early morning hours at the Capitol City Cafe eating the famous and top-se cret “Old Shoe with Cheese,” a dish that didn’t even appear on the menu and seemed to satisfy my drunken hunger no matter how sloshed I was. It was my freshman year in which I found a distaste for frat boys. You see, I had a hellish second semester with an arrogant, smelly young lad who managed to single-handedly make my life very in convenient. As a pledge, he was officially made every active brother’s bitch. We got 3 a.m. phone calls almost nightly from a drunken brother somewhere in town need ing anything from pizza to beer to God knows what else. He drank until unconscious quite fre quently, killing what little brain cells he could spare. It was a shame. He bathed very irregularly and kept most of his clothes in a pile on the floor, which he dug through whenever he need ed to change into something slightly less smelly. Ah, the joys of college. So, on to sophomore year in Capstone, which was not totally uneventful, but was very rainy and quite boring most of the time. My free time was spent either play ing video games, drinking beer or playing video games while drinking beer. I managed to get through the year, make a few friends and not flunk out. Life was pretty good, and it only got better. Junior year was the bomb. I finally opened my eyes and realized that I was in college and that I should make the most of my time here. I said goodbye to all my inhibitions, joined the two coolest student oiganiza tions on campus, stopped being afraid of girls and partied like a rock star. In the fall, nty roommate and I (no, not the frat boy anymore) decided to join the staff of our wonderful campus radio station, WUSC. The experience has been priceless. At WUSC, I was exposed to lots of while noise and a whole bunch of criti cally acclaimed, pretentipus, angst-ridden snob rock. But most of what I heard and played on my weekly radio show changed my tastes in music. Since I became a DJ, I’ve realized that everything but what is played on WUSC sounds the same to me. In the spring of ’99,1 joined the ram bunctious, eneigetic young staff of The Gamecock, where I met the most well written, well-spoken and well-mannered group of total bastards I have ever known. They were all terribly sarcastic. I fit right in. I eventually found my niche as the newsroom slackass and resident clown, and I didn’t really do much besides hang around to write an occasional CD or film review. It was the spring of ’99 when I wrote my first column, in which the staff and I created a fictitious Gamecock boy band (The Hi Notes) that has remanifested it self through inside jokes ever since. I still have friends call me ‘Bif Bevington’ from time to time. Not only did I make new friends in two organizations that year, but I also made friends across the hall and in my building. Of my three roommates today, one lived next door to me, another lived next door to him and the other lived three floors down. We partied. Our bathtub enjoyed the company of lots and lots of beer on many occasions. We threw spontaneous parties on weeknights. It was a blast. And for the first time, girls thought I was cute. I won dered, how did hell freeze over so sud denly? I learned so many important lessons my junior year. I learned that it wasn’t worth my time to care about what peo ple thought of me - oh, and that Frank’s hot dogs taste so much better when you have to jump through a moving train to get to them. Now, on to senior year. I joined a cam pus service organization in the fall, Alpha Phi Omega, earning many new friends and one wonderful girlfriend. We gave to the community and didn’t ask in return. I would say I felt like Robin Hood, but that would be mighty cocky of me. My history with arrogant Greeks who thought they were better titan me (it hap pens to all of us every now and again) made it difficult being a member in a - technically speaking - Greek organiza tion. But I learned to take pride in what my oiganization was doing. I moved up as a Gamecock staffer, first becoming an assistant entertainment editor in the fall, and then an assistant viewpoints editor in the spring. It was in the spring when I began getting on every one’s last nerve with my weekly columns. Ahh, those were the days. Yup, you wrote me letters - mean ones, nice ones, it didn’t matter. I had a voice, and I was speaking on behalf of everyone who has ever been underestimated or written off. Nice guys don’t always finish last. They just have to leant how to stand up rather than lay down and let everyone walk all over them. So, with all of that said and done and my final semester just about wrapped up, I would like to thank The Gamecock for giving me all of this space to fill. I realize that many have come before me and many will follow, and I am not too important in the grand scheme of this newspaper’s his tory. But I do feel appreciated. I’d like to take the remainder of this iu lei aii ui yuu miuw wiiu <uiu wnai I really and truly appreciate: The Gamecock, WUSC, Alpha Phi Omega, the teaching staff of the College of Journalism and Mass Communications, Wherehouse Music (shut up, I work there), Papa Jazz, everyone who got insulted in one of my columns and was a good sport about it - you are no longer the object of my fury, everyone who ever bought al cohol for me before I turned 21, every one for whom I ever bought alcohol af ter I turned 21, late-night Waffle House trips, spring breaks, Five Points, McKen zies, Rough Draft, Publick House, Jake’s, many wonderful shows put on by Fling (formerly The Speakeasies) at the Village Idiot, people who have made me laugh until I’ve cried (and there are many of you), people who drove me around be fore I had a car, people I’ve driven around since I’ve had a car, free beer (hey, it’s rare, but when it happens it’s beautiful), road trips td Athens, Ga. (amazing times with amazing people), New Year’s Eves, sorority council student senators from Jer sey, fire alarms, Jack Kerouac (for inspi ration), great conversations over GMP and Gibbes Court food, walks in the pour ing rain, large porches to sit on, spring time in Columbia, snow in the South, San ta Claus, the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy and last but definitely not least, my friends, family and loved ones. I love you all. Don’t you all wish you could go out like this? ’Nuff said. Much love for everyone. I’m outta here. Pete Johnson is a senior journalism major. He will be graduated later this month from the College of Journalism and Mass Communications. He can be reached at gamecockview points® hotmail.com. Submit letters to the editor to gamecockviewpoints@hotmail.com. The Death Penalty Clemency for the mentally impaired It’s difficult to avoid the con stant election in formation being fed to us by various sources. We’ve been in undated with such in formation, and through it all, I’ve managed to keep the same opinion of George W. Bush, whose administration seems imminent and inevitable. His record as governor of Texas looms large, and it’s hard for me not to think of him as an ex ecutioner. A Nov. 12 article that appeared in The New York Times fo cused on executions Patrick Rathbun is a junior jour nalism major. H.e will be attending the University of Nottingham in Nottingham, England, in the spring. He can be reached at gamecock- * viewpoints ©hotmail.com of the mentally retarded. More specifically, the article featured a profile of a mentally retarded man currently on Texas’ death row. Johnny Paul Penry has spent 20 years on death row, and he was scheduled to be exe cuted a number of weeks ago, but his exe- ; • cution is being appealed to the Supreme Court. The articles says in order to be consid ered mentally retarded, one must have an -1 IQ below 70 and an “inability to adapt to dai- -' ly life” Penry has an IQ of 56, and he does -; not seem to comprehend what might lie in his future, saying: “The only thing I know is they will have a needle in my arm, just like an IV, that’s going to put me to sleep.” If this doesn’t convince you of Pemy’s mental impairments, then consider that he still believes in Santa Claus and has the mind of a 6-year-old, according to his lawyer. Penry’s case looks bleak when consid ering that the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles has granted clemency once in the last five years for capital cases, according to the article. The European Union characterized ex ecutions of the mentally ill as degrading to “the dignity and worth of the human per son.” The American Bar Association wrote that such executions were “unacceptable in a civilized world.” I would argue similarly. Clearly, in Penry’s case, if not in all cas es involving the mentally retarded, there should be an exception or exceptions made. It is doubtful that Peniy truly knows right from wrong. His situation, along with many others across the countiy, is analogous to ad ministering the death penalty to juveniles. It seems that this “progression” might be the next logical step in capital cases. If we can execute those with mental deficiencies, then why not administer the death penalty to young criminals? Injustices run rampant from American society to the far reaches of the globe. This particular injustice is not uncommon. It is representative of society’s dismissal of the mentally ill. And this phenomenon is not a particularly American one. In many foreign countries, the mentally “deranged” are treat ed with contempt, as a second-class citizenry who are incapable of assimilating into soci ety’s inner circle of acceptability. Every day, the mentally ill are mistreat ed. They’re backed into dark corners, shunned, underestimated, labeled and not given chances to reform. Thirty-eight states have capital punish ment, while only 13 bar the execution of the mentally retarded. We should hope that 38 states abandon their “eye for an eye” phi losophy, but that might be a pipe dream. A reachable goal might be to hope that all 38 states with the death penalty adopt a policy to bar executions of the mentally retarded. When I think of the presidential debates, I think of Dubya advocating and praising “the ultimate punishment.” Immediately, I’m re minded of Johnny Paul Penry’s plight, as well as the everyday plight of the mentally ill. I’m hoping in the future that we become more understanding of those with psycho logical ailments, and that we might have more effective and widespread treatments for these underprivileged. I see a brighter future after the Bush ad ministration. Instead of Clinton fatigue, I see a kind of Republican fatigue and a more hope ■ ful and compassionate America with added clemency and understanding.