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THE GAMECOCK ♦ Wednesday, December 3,2003 ’ 5 SOUNDOFF TT^TTTAATlVTrri n ONLINEPOLL Create message boards at I % /% / I I III I I Should Lou Holtz retire? www.dailygamecock.com or I 111 */ \l I I III %| I l www.dailygamecock.com. send letters to the editor to I I J W W | \^/|l^| IK/ Results published on Fridays. gamecockopinions@hotmail.com —■ ■ ^ w l —■— —I— » 1 —■— IV—' v IN OUR OPINION I Power outages endanger USC (I Well, at least light pollution isn’t so much a problem on USC’s city campus these days. Power outages have seem to become a regular staple of college life here. Electrical explosions and repeated blackouts have become more than an inconvenience. That’s obvious when a professor and his graduate assistants are forced to shovel dry ice in the dark as they try to save years’ worth of research and enzymes. The university will get around to it—eventually. Essentially, USC places USC must ma e everything it cannot deal replacing outdated a electrical cables a , v . . .. x priority. Don't wait for on 1116 dus* dKl°llst things to completely la’ownas deferred fall apart before maintenance,” the ,making a difference, ultimate tool tor the procrastinating administrator. USC needs more than $200 million to cover deferred maintenance costs, of which $25 million is needed for utilities. The wiring problems at the Graduate Science Research Center are a serious safety issue, and this should be reason enough to fix them. In light of budget cuts and the race to be a contender in the research sphere of universities, these ignored outages must be addressed if USC wants to be taken seriously as an important and relevant research school. Acknowledging a problem doesn’t make it go away. USC must make replacing outdated electrical cables a priority. Don’t wait for things to completely fall apart before making a difference. Winners and Sinners ROCKET TRAIN Magnetically levitated Japanese train reaches 361 mph; America to build one soon. Start making those Christmas lists, kiddies. WORLD AIDS DAY Students fight to slow the worst global disaster, one giant quilt at a time. OZZY OSBOURNE Admits publicly after 44 years that he was molested as a child. S.C. PUBLIC SCHOOL STUDENTS Two in five students who took the PACT failed. Dang it, where’s Mississippi when you need it? UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA Fires head coach despite coach winning 75 percent of games during his six-year tenure. VH1 Creates and awards rapper P. Diddy with “Maverick of the Year” at the last minute to get him to agree to be a presenter. GAMECOCK CORRECTIONS If you see an error in today’s paper, we want to know. E-mail us at gamecockopinions@hotmail.com. ABOUT THE GAMECOCK Editor in Chief Charles Tomlinson ^^lanaging Editor ^Hdam Beam News Editor Michael LaForgia Asst. News Editor Alexis Stratton Viewpoints Editor Gftbrielle Sinclair The Mix Editor Meg Moore Sports Editor Brad Senkiw Asst. Sports Editor Wes Wolfe Photo Editor Morgan Ford Head Page Designer Shawn Rourk page Designers ^^ustin Bajan, Staci ^^P^rdan, Philip Whitehead Slot Copy Editors Amy Genoble, Tricia Ridgway, Mary Pinckney Waters Copy Editors Jessica Foster, Steven Van Haren Online Editor James Tolbert Public Affairs Kimberly Dressier i CONTACT INFORMATION Offices on third floor of the Russell House. Editor in Chief: gamecockeditor@hotmail.com News: gamecockudesk@hotmail.com Viewpoints: gamecockopinions@hotmail.com The Mix: gamecockmixeditor@hotmail.com Sports: gamecocksports@hotmail.com Public Affairs: gckpublicaffairs@hotmail.com Online: www.dailygamecock.com Newsroom: 777-7726 Editor’s Office: 777-3914 STUDENT MEDIA Director Scott Lindenberg Faculty Adviser Erik Collins Creative Director Susan King \ Business Manager Carolyn Griffin Advertising Manager Sarah Scarborough Classified Manager Sherry F. Holmes Production Manager Amber Justice Creative Services Whitney Bridges, Robbie Burkett, Sean O'Meara Advertising Staff John Blackshire, Adam Bourgoin, Ben Sinclair, Jesica Johnson, Ryan Gorman, Laytoya Hines The Gamecock is the editorially independent student newspaper of the University of South Carolina. It 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 pari by student-activity fees. One free copy per reader. Additional copies may be purchased for $1 each from the Department of Student Media. TO PUCE AN AD The Gamecock Advertising: 777-3888 1400 Greene St. Classified: 777-1184 Columbia, S.C. 29208 Fax- 777-6482 I — fVVPE, I HrtVEf J soheum: ^-1 MAWra/MCC I PROBLEMS | N1EAH...WE^E > REAL BUS? AfT / -THE MOMENT JEFtRKED * yc£ l/VA. /Va IAa\ tAr—v vW -Wv y CARTOON BY MARY PINCKNEY WATERS/THE GAMECOCK Meet the Bored of Trustees PATRICK AUGUSTINE GAMECOCKOPINIONS@HOTMAIL.COM Who makes the real decisions around here? One can hardly read student jnedia without running into re minders of what our glorious Student Senate is doing to allevi ate world poverty, bring peace to the Middle East or prevent Florida from screwing up the next election. From all the free press the sen ate gets, you’d think what it does is actually important, or carried the weight of law. Heck, do you think we’d pay attention to what all those bald ing men in Washington, D.C., do if they couldn’t tax us or bomb foreign countries? Despite the bashing that SG routinely receives, I agree that the idea of a body in which rep resentatives of the student body can express the concerns of the whole is important, which is why the Board of Trustees system frustrates me so much. You see, unlike the students who run for office, the 20 trustees actually have the power to change cur riculum, raise tuition and set ad missions standards. Yes, the real seat of power at USC is the board room in the Osborne Administration Building, a Horseshoe away from the stu dents in the Russell House. The conventional argument is that, like SG, where we elect rep resentatives to carry our bidding and ensure that football tickets are fairly distributed to all, the S.C. General Assembly chooses trustees to make informed deci sions about matters of higher ed ucation. Sixteen out of 20 sitting members of the board are voted on by state legislators, and we all know how much the Legislature loves higher education. If you haven’t been paying at tention, the recent tuition in creases are a result of the State House cutting funding for USC and other public colleges and universities. However, students at USC have about as big a role in select ing trustees as we do in influenc ing them—zilch. Sure, there are faculty and student liaison com mittees that the board uses to jus tify acting in our name, but the only students on that board are the top three members of SG, and even they have no vote when the chips are down. Any of this mak ing you feel like the District of Columbia, which has a “voice” in Congress but no vote? I recall we fought a war some 200-plus years ago in order to have a say in the decisions that affect us. The Board of Trustees has no impetus to give any credence to the concerns of students, as shown by the statement of member Eddie Floyd that “parking is a luxury” on campus. He said it in reference to the board’s decision to build a new garage next to the existing one on Blossom Street and to raise garage fees — easy to say when you have a convenient space out side the Osborne building. Fundamentally, the issue is about democracy — it is patently unfair for an institution whose purpose for existing is supposed ly to educate students to exclude them from anything but token representation. One of the goals of higher education is to instill citizenship and the ideals of democratic involvement in its re cipients, something an elitist gov ernance structure fails to do. While little can be expected to change in the near future, noth ing will happen if students don’t express outrage with being cut out of the process. Augustine is a third-year political science student. IN YOUR OPINION Religious dogma isn’t democracy I am writing to take issue with Jeff Mobley’s letter to the editor (“Pragmatism alone shouldn’t guide law,” Monday). Mobley makes a long argu ment for the idea that homo sexuality is wrong, or a “sin.” Like all people who apply their religious beliefs to the public policy realm, he makes a clas sic logical error that essential ly invalidates the rest of his (admittedly thoughtful) argu ment. He writes, “In simplest terms, I believe the Bible.” Well, lots of ideas flow natu rally from that statement. If you accept the Bible as something more than it is, a book written by many authors, over several long and discrete periods of history, encompass ing about as many shifts in hu man thought and perception as one might imagine, then you can always find scripture to back up whatever public policy arguments you might want to make. It is, in short, the intel lectual equivalent of cheating. Nothing in life is quite that easy, and I appeal to the read ers of this newspaper to avoid falling into these sorts of traps — they are the sources of end less conflict in human society, and one has only to look at the headlines to see that it is so. Everything might be a little easier to figure out if we picked one historical text and decided that it was “all true,” but a thinking person cannot easily circumvent the rules of logical thinking in this manner, no matter how easy it might make everything else to figure out from then on. TYLER LEE GRADUATE STUDENT IN LAW USC mistreats its own students It’s true what they say; Things happen in threes. I sent a letter to The Gamecock lamenting the intrusiveness of the bag-check policy when exiting, not enter ing, the Thomas Cooper Library — what should be an embar rassment to library administra tion and USC in general. I called a lawyer friend who assured me the only recourse I have to spare myself the intru sion is to go without a bag. According to her, the library could argue that the bag check deters theft of student belong ings, not necessarily library property — an absurd asser tion. The bag check is an intru sion into students’ privacy for no other reason than to check for stolen books. This Friday, in what seemed like a ploy to irritate my al ready-tenuous relationship with the library, the student worker at the checkout desk told me I could not check out any books because I’d not re turned a recalled book. I was as tounded — not because of the drastic measure (revoking stu dents’ privilege to check out books and thereby depriving them of the right to learn), but because I’d never received such a notification. Turns out the li brary had sent an e-mail to my university account. I have nev er checked this account and had no idea I was responsible for providing USC with an alterna tive e-mail address. I left the checkout desk utterly frustrat ed and made my way past the bag checker, who dutifully called me back. I’d walked de terminedly past him without opening my book bag. Aggravated to speechlessqess, I flashed the contents of my bag and got a monotone “OK. Thank you.” Needless to say, the student enforcer didn’t bother to scruti nize any of the three books (one of which was, in fact, a library book). The last of USC’s three-prong assault on me happened in the stu dent parking lot behind the Roger Center. Because the parking lots across from the School of Music are — as of this week—no longer available and all street parking was taken, I drove to the student parking lot. As I pulled up, I saw two men collecting $5 from every one. I thought, “Surely, this can’t apply to students.” Well, despite telling the attendant I was a stu dent with a student parking decal and that I was headed to the School of Music, he said coldly, “Tonight this isn’t a student lot. $5.” I pulled into the lot, made a U tum and drove to the faculty park ing lot at Wardlaw College (where I’d been previously). Yes, these lots can transform into “event” lots at anytime and without prior warning — says so right on the USC Parking Services Web site. What I’ve been forced to con clude from all this is that USC is not student-centered. Period. True, USC students, like students ev erywhere, are charged not only for an education but also for services. However, USC is derelict in pro viding us with the user-friendly services we pay for — and should demand. Consequently, we feel like second-class citizens in a place erected to serve us. Imagine that. KEVIN SIMMONDS GRADUATE STUDENT IN MUSIC Submission Policy | Letters to the editor should be less than 300 words and include name, phone number, professional title or year and major, if a student. E-mail letters to gamecockopinions@hotmail.com. Letters will be edited. Anonymous letters will not be published. Call the newsroom at 777-7726 for more information. £ For the love of health spending > x m. RYAN HOLT GAMECOCKOPINIONS@HOTMAIL.COM The necessary evil that young people must face. In an effort to step away from my usual sermons on the great ness of the conservative move ment, I thought I’d approach an issue of politics from an unbiased stance. The issue? Medicare. Far too many of us don’t care at all, unwary how it impacts us as stu dents even now. After several grueling hours of debate and failed votes, House members, with encouragement from the president and House leadership, passed a new Medicare prescription drug plan with a five-vote margin. The Senate followed suit after its own troubles, including a clotured fil ibuster by Ted Kennedy. The highly controversial legis lation is soon to be law, awaiting approval by the president. Most citizens don’t realize that begin ning in 2006, when the Medicare Prescription Drug Modernization Act takes effect, taxpayers will be charged more to pay for this pro gram. A House version of the bill allowed for a privatization mea sure, which would have greatly re duced costs on the part of taxpay ers. However, reluctance by bi partisan members of both Houses scrapped the provision, resulting in the current piece of legislation. The question at hand is what in the world does this have to do with people your age? The downside is that there is a heavy financial price that you will have to pay one day. The Heritage Foundation estimates the extra tax cost per household in 2030 to be $1,125. The benefits are extensive and will one day apply to us, some thing much appreciated by many of America’s seniors. Beginning in 2006, individuals will pay only $35 to receive the following health coverage. If someone is in need of medication, he will re ceive coverage up to $250 for pre scription drugs. For drug costs between $250 and $2,000, the pay ee will contribute 20 percent of the cost while Medicare pays for the remaining 80 percent. For drug costs exceeding $3,500, low income and middle-class seniors will pay only 5 percent of costs. Until 2006, seniors can pur chase a discount card for $30 that will provide a discount between 10 percent and 15 percent on drug purchases. Students and other nonseniors now have the option to set aside several thousands of dollars in tax-free health savings accounts. With the greater numbers of people entering places in the line of senior citizens, there comes the greater responsibility younger gen erations have to monitor their well-being. Not only are we given the tax burden, but we’re met with me mougnt mat pernaps me cur rent Medicare might not even be enough. Perhaps when we are run ning the country, the true effects of the long-gone Baby Boom will come to our attention. In the mean time, we can watch and hope that the right decisions have been made in regard to health care and, more specifically, prescription drugs. Although Medicare and just plain health care seem terribly bor ing, the importance is colossal. Americans are faced with a scale — on one side is impeccable health care, on the other is a greater tax burden. I say what I always say for good programs — cut spending elsewhere to pay for it instead of raising our taxes. But really, it’s up to our generation to decide be cause we’ll be reaping both the costs and the benefits. Holt is a first-year political science student.